For the special effects study and use the ābuilt-inā extensions Basic Screen Effects and Image Centering by Emily Short.
Extensions generally provide you with extra functionality, and including these two, helps you do just what I think you want:
Include Basic Screen Effects by Emily Short.
Include Glulx Image Centering by Emily Short.
When play begins: clear the screen; display Figure 1 centered; wait for any key.
To display Figure 2 when the player arrives on the deck, you just need to use the display phrase inside a rule that fires when the player arrives on the deck. Inform automatically tries looking as soon as the player enters a new location, so you might display the figure from within a rule for looking. E.g.:
After looking in the Deck: display Figure 2; continue the action.
And, yes, you can use sound, too. See chapter 22 of the documentation (and possibly the extension Multiple Sounds by Massimo Stella, which is not ābuilt-inā but must be downloaded from the Inform 7 website and installed on your computer before use).
Note that, to date, using graphics and sound will make your game not work when played via Parchment/Quixe on the web. For example, hereās Alabaster: iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2F ā¦ ter.gblorb
If youāre using the Gnome Inform 7 IDE, sound blorbification wonāt work due to a bug in cBlorb. Iām trying to get some attention on that over at inform7.com/mantis
Not quite. Writing a game that fails to check whether the interpreter supports graphics before displaying them is what causes it to break in that way. The basic Inform library display routines do, I believe, check this properly.
Ah, well, āFigure 1ā was just a dummy name for a dummy file. You should use the names you yourself have declared for your jpg-files:
When play begins: clear the screen; display the figure of image1 centered; wait for any key.
After looking in the Deck: display the figure of image2; continue the action.
Iāve been using the Glulx option on the latest Inform7 release on a Mac to compile my adventure.
It was complaining about not having a startpage and endpage graphics and music, so I added some appropriate files (.jpg and .ogg).
It now compiles fully, but gives ā[Sound effect number 5 here.ā in the interpreter upon startup.
Should one not be able to make an adventure using Glulx and not use sound/graphics? (Mac doesnāt seem to support them anyway).
By the way, Iām using the following extensions, which could be a source of the problem.
Chapter - Extensions
[Include Multiple Sounds by Massimo Stella]
Include Deluxe Doors by Emily Short
[Automatically includes Locksmith by Emily Short and Plurality by Emily Short.]
Include Measured Liquid by Emily Short
[Automatically includes Plurality by Emily Short.]
Include Modern Conveniences by Emily Short
[Automatically includes Plurality by Emily Short.]
Include Computers by Emily Short
[Automatically includes Plurality by Emily Short.]
Include Exit Lister by Eric Eve
[Automatically includes Basic Screen Effects by Emily Short.]
Include StartEnd MenuPages by ShadowChaser
[Automatically includes Menus by Emily Short, Basic Screen Effects by Emily Short, and Useful Functions by ShadowChaser.]
Havenāt been using Inform7 that long, so would appreciate someone pointing me in the right direction.
This message appears in an interpreter which does not support sound when a sound would normally be played. The Mac IDE canāt play back any sounds - and neither can standalone Zoom (which is basically the same code used in the Mac IDE). But if you run the same game in Gargoyle, which supports sound, youāll hear them. So you can make a game with sounds in the Mac IDE, you just canāt hear those sounds in the Mac IDE.
Re: Image Centering
I think the extension Glulx Image Centering has been broken for a long time (IE it just doesnāt work)? Let me know if you find Iām wrong. But if it is broken, there is no really ācheapā way to centre an image in glulx. Youād need to use a more substantial extension to do so, like Glimmr something, or perhaps Flexible Windows?.. anyway, my casual advice is donāt worry about image centering 'til further down the track. Image control beyond the most basic kind (slap an image on the screen, aligned left) is hard to do without stepping up to one of the more sophisticated extensions, since players have their windows in all different shapes and sizes, and on top of that, different interpreters react to size mismatches in different ways (EG some scale the image to fit, others display at a fixed size and just let the too-big parts go off the screen, etc.)
Re: StartEnd MenuPagesā¦ this extension is designed to include sound and graphics in a glulx game by default. If you want its menu features alone, you will indeed have to chop out the lines which define the title pages and the sounds, and the lines which display/play them.
The only extension which does a similar thing is the one StartEnd was based on, Jon Ingoldās āTitle Pageā, and under Glulx, it also wants a title page by default (but no sounds.)
Glulx Image Centering is built into Inform 7 and works correctly, as far as I am aware - I canāt see any bug reports about it, and a quick test appears to confirm that it has no obvious problems.
I just tried it myself and youāre right. Well, thatās good news for all of us. I canāt remember how and when I decided it didnāt work, but it was a ways ago. Presumably Iāve just been suffering with stupid, non-centred images ever since.
Gargoyle unfortunately doesnāt support centred images in text windows. (Or centred text for that matter.) It can do centred images in graphics windows, but thatās a whole lot more work.
THATāS where I got the idea from! So there is something that Gargoyle doesnāt doā¦ unless itās not doing it because itās staying on spec and everyone else is cheating.
The guess about my using a Mac is correct.
While I canāt use the built-in interpreter of the IDE to hear the sounds, is there a hosting site that will play them on the net?
My goal is to make the adventures available by storing them on dropbox and providing a link to play them from a web-based interpreter.
Perhaps there is a site that runs gargoyle???
Zifmia can do it, but Iāve never put a public host together for it. Itās on the to do list. Actually, Zifmia can do anything you can do in a browser web application. But it would require front-end web programming skills to develop anything against it.
