Bamboozle - a new Blorb creation tool

[andrewj]

Bamboozle is a new tool for creating and manipulating blorb files which I have been working on for about a month.

It is a TUI (text user interface), so on Linux, BSDs and MacOS X needs to be run from a terminal. On Windows, you can just double-click and the console should appear automatically, but it can be run from cmd.exe or Powershell too.

Screenshot:

There are binary packages for Linux and Windows. It would be nice if somebody could build a MacOS package (is it C code with almost no dependencies).

Link: Andrew Apted / bamboozle · GitLab

[SomeOne2 (Max Fog)]

I swear, this might just be a life-saver for me…

[Jamespking (Marco Innocenti)]

Can one edit a game’s UUID with this?

[JTN]

Surely not right now.
In a Blorb file, according to the spec, the IFID can come either from an ‘IFmd’ (iFiction XML) chunk, or failing that, be embedded in the story chunk itself (Glulx/z8 file or whatever).
Bamboozle doesn’t yet understand the former (although it may eventually be able to add/replace an IFmd chunk in which you’ve put a new IFID), and it seems unlikely it’ll be extended toward binary-patching the latter (since I think it doesn’t concern itself with the contents of constituent files/chunks in a Blorb).

(The spec notwithstanding, I don’t know how wise it would be in practice to try overriding an IFID embedded in a story file with a different one in iFiction XML – do consumers that care about IFIDs reliably ignore the story file IFID in this case?)

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

@JTN

do consumers that care about IFIDs reliably ignore the story file IFID in this case?

Yes, I think most clients look at the ifiction chunk first.

[improvmonster]

downloaded the code but there are no files with ‘full’ in the filenames.

tried to ‘make’ on macos but get:
fatal error: ‘tweakutf8.h’ file not found

which i’m assuming is because i don’t have whatever ‘full’ versions i need.

[jkj_yuio]

seem to be missing?

#include "tweakutf8.h"
#include "tweakchar.h"
#include "tweakscreen.h"

[JTN]

@improvmonster

downloaded the code but there are no files with ‘full’ in the filenames.

1. Start here (the link from the original post)
2. Click on “︎ 1 Release” on the right-hand sidebar
3. Under “Version 0.8.0”, there’s .tar.*/.zip files under “Assets” (not the ones you want) and, lower down, -full-src.zip/.tar.gz under “FULL SOURCES” (the ones you want).

I had no trouble compiling the latter.

[improvmonster]

worked great. thx!

[improvmonster]

is there anyway you could post a short example blorb resource file?

it seems like every blorb builder out there (glorb, pblorb, or whatever) have a different syntax and I never know exactly how it should look.

[andrewj]

@JTN

Click on “︎ 1 Release” on the right-hand sidebar

Thanks for mentioning that.

With Gitlab, just going to the tag’s page use to be enough to see the release notes and any attached files, it sucks that they have made this UX even worse now, hiding those thing behind an extra link.

P.S. I have fixed the link in the README. I shall update the repo to include those header files too (and hence another release I guess).

[andrewj]

@improvmonster

is there anyway you could post a short example blorb resource file?

I’m not sure what you are asking.

The screenshot shown above is for the game Andromeda Apocalypse (Extended), whose blorb file you can download from IFDB.

That blorb file contains a game file – the blorb type is Exec and the format is Glulx.

It also contains two images – blorb type Pict and format is JPEG, and one sound whose format is OGG/Vorbis.

Does that help?

[improvmonster]

I figured it out. I was under the mistaken assumption that I would need to import a resource file (like gblorb) but this way is much better.