Can you turn off the game pausing and asking for -more- when it fills the screen? (And, if so, how?)
Primarily asking because in the IDE there is some gratification to seeing the command prompt after a successful compile, but if I a long amount of starting text, instead I see -more- and have to press a key to get the endorphin payoff.
It may be possible to modify the interpreter to do this, but I don’t know what interpreters, nor have I looked at the codes to see how to modify them.
For the Z-machine, MORE prompts are generated by the interpreter. However, the game can turn them off if it sets the line counter to -999. Dumb Frotz has a command line switch to ignore cues for MORE prompts entirely. That’s useful because of the assorted fun uses Dumb Frotz has been put to. I haven’t really seen any reason to add the option to the curses or SDL interfaces.
Thanks. I’m working in Glulx, though. Any idea of what I might be able to do in that case?
In Glulx, it’s entirely up to the interpreter.
You could print some text, wait a very short period of time, and then print more text. Then the interpreter will (probably) assume that you’ve read all the text and not print a more prompt. This falls under the heading of “doing abdominal surgery to relieve indigestion” and I don’t recommend it.
I know this is an old thread but I would very much like to know how to set the line counter to -999 with Inform 6 building for Z5; is there a quick answer as to how? My experiments and Google-fu have failed to bear fruit.
As far as I can tell (from the Z-Machine Standards document and brief experimentation), the opcode that allows this is @put_wind_prop, and it only applies to Z6.
okie dokie, thanks for confirming, I was afraid that might be the case…