Bundling

Authoring Publishing
1

In the Inform FAQ from Roger Firth he speaks about:

Can I combine a game and an interpreter in a single file?
Very occasionally, it’s convenient to distribute a single ready-to-run package containing both
a Z-code game file and a suitable interpreter. I know of a couple of tools which do just this:
• John Holder’s Jzip interpreter includes the JZEXE bundling tool (PC and UNIX)
• L Ross Raszewski has a more generalized utility called BundleMonkey (PC only)
Try it: here’s my tiny (50KB) Cloak of Darkness example, in the form of a Jzip bundle
(155KB), a Monkey bundle with WinFrotz (275KB), and a plain WinZip archive with WinFrotz
(95KB).

The links do not work any more. Does anyone know how to to this today?

Thomas

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2

Sending out binaries that you’re asking people to trust was a tricky business back when that was written, and much more so now. Unless the players know you well, or you can provide a digitally signed binary distributed through a major gaming platform, very few people will run it.

This page will let you convert a Z-code file to a self-contained HTML-file, which you can either send to someone, or publish on a website: Parchment HTML Converter

All the resources it needs are put into a single file, so it’s all very easy.

You can also put your Z-code file somewhere online, and start it using this page: https://iplayif.com/ . The URL you get can be sent to others, and they can just follow the link to play.

If you want to let someone play on a locally installed interpreter, I’d advice them to install Gargoyle, start it and point it to the game file.

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3

You can bundle any parser IF in Lectrote, which is wide cross-platform (Win, Linux, MacOs).
Of course, being Lectrote a couple hundred megabytes, PunyInform is so much wasted. (You are using Puny, right?)

If you want to see a (free) example of bundled Lectrote check Wolfsmoon.

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4

Yes;=)

5

Unfortunately it didn’t seem to work when I tried it.

$ file Wolfsmoon 
Wolfsmoon: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.6.26, BuildID[sha1]=a2a3c1012f53f7dce63cb60ac918c68ff20b68d1, stripped
$ ./Wolfsmoon 
./Wolfsmoon: error while loading shared libraries: libgconf-2.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
6

Uhm.

These are relatively old builds, from 2018 iirc. I tried it in Orbstack and it doesn’t work either. Also, the Mac version is now rejected by the OS’ own security walls.

I don’t have time now to try and fix it (on a deadline for a comp), but will look into it later on.

Anyone can try the Windows executables?

7

1
11186×743 184 KB

Works fine under windows :+1:

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