Could IFDB have screenshots?

Is there a way, or could there be a way to add screenshots to an IFDB entry?

Right now I can’t see any obvious provision. There are offsite links, which could sort-of accommodate this, but in a somewhat clumsy way.

Also, thinking of not just screenshots but also supplementary artwork, concept art, design sketches, soundtracks and movies even?

What do you think?

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Honestly, I kinda like the idea. We already sort of informally do it when we quote parser exchanges in the reviews anyway. The only thing I could see potentially problematic is if screenshots can work as a spoiler. You see this in reviews as well, but often these bits are hidden behind spoilered text. Having that be an option for screenshot images might be wise.

The only counter thought is what adding a few screenshots to a bunch of the IFDB listings might do collectively in greater bandwidth and storage requirements. Small changes applied universally can have big effects.

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Once upon a time (like ten years ago) I did an experiment: go through every game in games/zcode and games/glulx, launching each one in a custom interpreter that just recorded the opening screen in HTML form.

The results were imperfect but I thought it could be generally useful. Never did anything with it though.

Perhaps the concept is obsolete, anyhow – it’s just as easy to launch the game itself in your browser and see the opening screen live.

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I’d think it would be more useful for games with custom styling, rather than just bare Z-code and Glulx—though I’m also not thinking of any games where a screenshot would make me more likely to play it, really.

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For the text-graphic IF with UI, the usefulness of a screenshot is worth thousand words ? or is not worth few words, like, for example, (sorry for putting again my known bias on IF graphic UI) a “Legend UI” (or even “Legend-like UI”) tag ?

of course, a screenshot of the opening location gives a definite idea of the story’s UI, and the last few Comp’s twine works has shown a rather large variety of UI… so I’m in favor of adding screenshot, provided that there’s some means of keeping manageable the added server HD space needed.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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What i had in mind, rather than some automated initial screen-shot, was a new IFDB edit field whereby the author could optionally add a few screenshots. This would show potential players the UI style and give a glimpse of gameplay.

Totally agree that this would be a potential spoiler, but i think a lot of people would find it useful. As suggested, perhaps some kind of spoiler alert protection could be used.

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this is what itchio does and I think it can be useful. not sure about including other media types (audio or video). maybe limiting it to 2-3 would help with server space, or hosting it on an outside site (the latter might go against archive sensibilities, I suppose). It would be cool to see custom styling or character art (like the art in Birdland or Detective Osiris) separate from the game if the author wants, right on the page.

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Indeed. Adding character art would be cool. Maybe other art pieces too. To limit usage, there could either be a limit on the number of pictures or perhaps a size limit.

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Really, disk space is our cheapest resource right now. The IFDB server has 63 gigabytes free.

I’m currently working on adding another 80 gigabytes of disk to the IF Archive machine, and that should come in around $10/month if I’ve got this figured right.

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Great Stuff! That’s really encouraging to hear.

In which case, i think it’s really quite a good idea to allow authors to upload additional art for IFDB game, including for example screen shots.

For example, i have some quite nice supplementary art pieces I’d like to add to some of my game pages. Some character art too. I feel this could be quite a benefit to players and size-wise we’re not talking much really. 2k pictures come in under 1/2MB, 3k at ~1.5MB and 4K around 2-3MB. Small potatoes overall.

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Just out of idle curiosity, is the archive regularly backed up on offline storage in case the hard drive crashes or zeppelin comes crashing in through the ceiling? I’m fairly confident measures have been taken, just curious what they are.

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All our servers are hosted at Linode, which has excellent service guarantees and onsite backups.

For offsite backups, IFDB does daily/weekly/monthly dumps to AWS storage.

I’ve been doing the same for the IF Archive once per year. However, as part of adding the new volume, I’m writing a script to also do nightly syncs to AWS storage. Not so much for off-site-ness (Linode is reliable); just because backup storage is cheaper at AWS.

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That’s super awesome and competent and completely unsurprising coming from you. Thank you for satiating my curiosity.

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I could see originally how screenshots might be considered superfluous for IF which in most cases are (and were) just screens of text, possibly with cover art, so in-game screenshots would make sense. Now with UI styling and multimedia in more types of games this would be valid.

Especially when you’ve got artists like G.C. Baccaris making games like this:

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Considering the traditional scale of games in this genre, I find myself wondering if it’s possible to have a game where a screenshot is bigger than the game file. And if this genre might be the best suited to vectorized screenshots outside of old arcade games that used vector graphics.

I also find myself wondering of the feasibility of a torrent containing all of ifarchive.

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We support rsync now. See: Downloading the entire IF Archive

A torrent seems like a bad fit because if it were, say, a zip file, the file would change daily. rsync is better for this.

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Definitely possible to have a screenshot bigger than the game file! The cover art for Miss Gosling makes up over 80% of the zblorb, because Dialog for some reason only allows PNGs, not JPEGs. I have no idea why.

The .z8 file is 288.9 kiB, the cover art is 1.3 MiB.

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Might be worth using a “screenshot” tool that dumps styled (static) HTML rather than, say, a PNG file.

For the games without graphics, I mean. The Heretic’s Hope example might as well be a PNG file.

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I’ll check out the link in question, but one of the nice things about torrents you don’t get with most other distribution methods is being able to bundle multiple files together without needing to put them into a container file of some kind and a newer version of a torrent being able to be pointed at existing files and just downloading the new ones. Though, admittedly, if new files are being added daily, might not be the best option for keeping fully up-to-date.

I feel like the only reason zip sticks around is because major web browsers still kind of suck by default at batch downloading.

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For parser fiction you could hook up Parchment to headless Chrome and output an image. But as others have said, it’s very easy to just open the online player.

The biggest use for screenshots would be for things not at the beginning of a playthrough. This seems to me to be something that should be manually added, not automatically generated for every IFDB entry.

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