Hello… I’m baaaaaaaack. 
So I was thinking I might see if I can take my little first-timer IF game and convert it to a web-based format so I can make it into an easter egg on my website.
I know I’ve played a couple of web-based IF games, long ago, but I don’t know what the format was or if there’s an easy way to convert games already built in Inform.
Can someone point me in the right direction?
Thanks!
The best web-based interpreter, IMO, is Parchment:
It supports (only) the Z-Machine, which means you can write your game in Inform and run it on Parchment. Of course, that means you have to use the Z-Machine backend in your project settings, and so your game can’t be too large or use Glulx-specific features.
Andrew Plotkin is working on a web-based interpreter for Glulx games, but I think he’s still in the early stages.
Ah – good to know. If I recall correctly, my game is too big to use Z machine.
Maybe I’ll write a speed game for my website easter egg!
Not to worry – a fantastic glulxe interpreter is in the wings – a demo is running now. It uses Silverlight, though. Check RAIF.
Why is it running silverlight? Why not Flash, or Java? You know, something that’s portable.
Ergh. So I tried to use this Parchment thing, and my game URL gave me:
I didn’t see any emails or troubleshooting pages or anything… anyone know about this?
Is it really just a matter of typing the URL of the game into that form? There’s no submit button or anything, so I’m really confused about what it’s even doing.
Thanks for any assistance anyone can give.
I tried the javascript way too, and it never gave me a whole javascript file – the extension was always “.part”.
404 is a file not found error. You might want to try to rename the file so that it doesn’t have spaces in it, sometimes that helps.
Weird, Niktu. Actually I had done that and it didn’t change anything. And I had also verified that the file was there by typing it in a browser window.
I ended up using zmpp which is very self-explanatory and easy to configure. Plus it doesn’t need to be hosted by a third party like Parchment.
Just for the record, Parchment does not need to be hosted by a third party. It’s open source software, and IMO has a much better user experience than ZMPP, mostly because it doesn’t require Java.
On the other hand, I’ll admit that it’s probably not easy to set up your own hosted version for someone not familiar with the command line. You can get the code from code.google.com/p/parchment/ and run the tools there to build the necessary files that you can upload to your web host.
Also, I got the other game working just fine with Parchment: parchment.googlecode.com/svn/tru … EggHunt.z5 (The other one gives a “too large” error message; non-blorbed it would probably work.)
Weird. Thanks for the tips. Guess it was the blorb-ness.
I couldn’t even find instructions anywhere on what to do other than upload it to the hosted site. Well, no matter, looks like I have several options now.