Bisquixe redelevopment: Feature list and reevaluation

Thanks for putting this together and for continuing to develop Bisquixe! Whatever the future might hold, game authorship is an ongoing matter of interest today.

I have identified some minor tweaks and suggestions that aren’t really relevant to what I see as a more high-level discussion; I’ll pass those on elsewhere.

As a general comment, it would be good to get extensions and prerequisites to a central location. For Inform 10, that’s the Friends of Inform repo. I share the concerns regarding GEP versioning in particular, since it seems hard to document/centralize.

Hyperlinks

An inline option is desirable. I’ve been using the one suggested elsewhere by Daniel, and it is working well so far. I’m not sure how it performs with styling. I initially thought it wouldn’t support it, but I have some new ideas. The solution requires Formatting Capture, which I believe is unreleased. If we could push toward an easily documented (or built-in) solution for inline links, that would be ideal.

The keyboard stuff is incompatible with my current version of Story Mode because it uses Daniel’s Command Preloading (which also does things with the keyboard). This isn’t a huge deal, I’m just mentioning it.

Audio and Image setting

This is more of an interpreter thing (I think), but I haven’t been able to get cross-fading/ introducing (from the music extension) working. It’s very possible that I’m just not using it right.

I wonder if we should discuss file formats for audio. I think we’re hard-coded for MP3 atm because of Safari, but Inform doesn’t support MP3. Perhaps the better move is dropping audio support for iOS? The current state of mobile play is already kind of a mixed bag.

CSS setting

Readability aside, I think it would be nice to be able to optionally send raw CSS (unformatted by the extension) for cases where the typical “triad” doesn’t apply. I’m thinking of things like keyframe animations, @font-face, and perhaps even media queries.

I’m interested in your comments regarding performance. Is there guidance or advice we should provide authors, or is this such a remote possibility that we don’t need to worry about it?

Anyway, thanks for maintaining this! Happy to test and/or discuss anything, as well as update the reference as needed.

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