Yup! It was done in 1893, A World’s Fair Mystery , (Peter Nepstad, 2002) which had a clickable compass. In the end it was not much used. You know, you’re typing your stuff, then you must raise your hand, move it to the mouse, move the mouse over the compass, click, move your hand again to the keyboard and keep on typing. Mixing different kind of interfaces doesn’t always work. For most people, focusing in one of them and just typing your NEWS turned out to be a more pleasant and fluid experience.
Balances (Graham Nelson, 1994) or City of Secrets (Emily Short, 2003) were also examples of doing such things with Inform and Glulxl.
I think those are both compiled to glulx, not Z-code – Balances is an old game, but per IFDB those UI enhancements came in 2001. But they are Inform 6 (I7 only came out in 2006).
I couldn’t read balances.blb (crazy character set) where all the UI enhancements are. But the link shows z5 and the source code makes no mention of any UI that I can see.
Any help on this direction is appreciated. I even researched z6, which seems to be a natural development direction, but seems like very few terps are capable of fully realizing z6 full potential, despite all the glulx/blorb games in existence.
Version 6 is very different from all the other Z-machine versions. It adds a dozen or so unique opcodes, optional operands to some older opcodes, and has a completely different screen model. Supporting it is a lot of work and barely a half dozen or so games use it so it’s no surprise it isn’t widely implemented.
Fun fact: While version 6 is needed for images, mouse support works in version 5 (see Beyond Zork). Although the read_mouse opcode is only in version 6, mouse clicks can be read in version 5 as keyboard input, with the coordinates of the clicks recorded in the extension header.
I agree. Dialog supports mouse-playable parser games if the author does the work - it’s decently implemented in The Impossible Bottle - but it does become a hassle. I tried playing it mouse only but the moment I have to type something I stop using the mouse.
It sounds so lazy “I don’t want to move my hand to the right…” but it’s weirdly true. It’s less about distance and more about breaking fragile immersion because I’ve got to glance down and relocate the mouse and the home-row on a regular basis.
In my case, Infocom games became my groove when I learned to touch-type and no longer needed to look away from the screen.
Ideally you want all-keyboard, all-mouse, or “shooter combo” with right hand on the mouse and left on consistent control keys.
That was pretty funny (is that an Apple IIc ??) but wasn’t sure - was that indicating impressive computer skills when it was flipping between three PNG images while he typed?
Speaking of which, assuming HyperCard has internet links, it could’ve been an original web browser!
Of course, it’s famous use case was Myst, and @inventor200 way of programming multitude screen+hotspots separately doesn’t look too weird, anymore. You just need some gross (500 MB!) data storage for it.
And then you follow it up with an extensive and passionate endorsement for refactoring one’s code lmao, just to make sure we are building good habits alongside quick understanding.
