I looked at the limitations of Vorple and it seems to have a wee ways to go before it is at the same maturity as Parchment.
That said, it appears to have a lot of promise and I hope someone puts up a site so it can be tried out and feedback given.
David;
A lot of colleagues do puzzles for geocaching. Some very good puzzle caches require one to play an online text adventure to find the coordinates for the geocache.
It always adds to the attraction, if sounds and images are possible. (As you can see, I’m slightly liberal in my opinions about whether or not text adventures should be text only.)
If Zifmia can allow one to literally have all the bells and whistles in an adventure, I do hope you manage to get it set up online sometime.
If it’s not yet truly possible to play sounds in Inform7 when using parchment, is it possible to cause ones browser to be called up, download and play a sound file from something like dropbox? For my immediate needs, that might give me the ability to write a story in which the player needs to guess the name of a tune that is played and then return to the adventure to proceed.
Has anyone any ideas about how to do this, when using parchment (or similar) as a host?
I’ve had some help from Juhana and Vorple seems like it might just do the job.
There is a bit of a hurdle though in that there is no public site running the Vorple interpreter … yet.
While I can’t say for sure how easy or fast this is to do, I just may know someone who can help set it up.
I’ll post an update if I’m successful.
In the meantime, I hope that people will post updates if they make any advances in this area.
There are many free internet hosts, especially when you’re just hosting static files and don’t need a dynamic server. Github is an easy recommendation - it’s where I host Parchment!
Just to clarify that you don’t have to install anything to the server. Just upload the files somewhere they’re accessible (Dropbox will do) and you’re set. (I assume that won’t be a problem because you need to upload the story and media files somewhere anyway.)
Forgive me for perhaps misunderstanding you, but did you mean that the interpreter would actually run on the dropbox site?
If so; Maybe I just don’t fully understand the mechanics of how the release on inform7 is set up to work.
I would have assumed that posting the files on dropbox would mean one has to download the entire release to play it.
By that, I mean that they’d have to install the interpreter on their own machine.
In geocaching, there is a bit of an unwritten rule that one doesn’t ask the end-user to load any software on their computer.
Some people don’t follow it, but I’d like to try not to break that rule.
I assume that this would mean running Vorple off a site like GitHub, as was mentioned by another poster.
That’s right. If you just upload the whole thing and make the folder public it will work just fine. No need for the player to download or install anything either.
Here is some test code I tried, but which did not work.
The files are stored locally and the game was run from the browser.
The game comes up as expected, but no sound.
I have tried my browser (Safari) on the online test game and it works fine.
Any ideas?
My sound files are in: Sounds Materials > Release > media > audio
(I put a copy in “music” as well, just in case it is looking there.)
I later added a line to show an image and that worked very well.
So, I’m not sure why the sounds don’t play.
Perhaps there’s something in the sound-file that is not compatible? e.g. mp3 tags
[code]“Sounds” by Gary
Release along with the “Vorple” interpreter.
Include Vorple Core by The Vorple Project.
Include Multimedia by The Vorple Project.
When play begins:
play mp3 sound file “doorbell.mp3”.
The Soundbooth is a room. “This is a test of Vorple Sound.”.[/code]
It appears that the manifest for generating the release of Vorple may have pointed to the Release directory for where to find media, rather than in the media directory structure under the Release directory per the Multimedia doc. When I place my media files in the Release directory, everything appears to work as it should, even when using Safari of all things.
One has to clear the history in Safari to ensure that running an updated release actually runs the newly released files.
Gary - now that you’ve done this for Vorple, can you give me a idea of what a list of requirements would look like for someone implementing an online game?
If I have a better idea of what an author would want, I can bend Zifmia to those requirements and make something available.
I have written IF, but I’m really not in author mode at the moment. I’m in platform mode.
I still need to check that Vorple runs from dropbox, when accessed as it would be by a typical web-user.
So far, I’ve managed to get it to run with the release directory on dropbox and the webpage initiated from the Inform IDE release screen.
I don’t see any real issues in getting this to work, but I still need to do it to be sure.
As for some “first thought” functional requirements for your platform:
You might want to start with the added functional capabilities exhibited by Vorple (in addition to those available from via Inform7). That is, the ability to play sound and music files (mp3 or ogg), display graphics (jpg or png at a minimum), hyperlink to a specified URL and play online videos (such as YouTube) on the users stock browser. There are a few other nice capabilities of Vorple, such as tool-tips and embedded html code etc., but your platform undoubtably has some nice touches too.
The average web-user will want to be able to run a game using the standard web-browser that is offered with his computer hardware and without extensions or add-ons. This is as-shipped IE 8 for Windows and Safari for the Mac. In Linux, it’s a bit of a crap-shoot and I’d defer that decision for now. I’m not a fan of requiring the user to install another browser to play a game or any other supporting programs. In geocaching, requiring the user to install anything is actually rather strongly discouraged.
Any authoring additions to Inform7 must be relatively easy to install and use, provided the User has read the supplied documentation. That is they should use the standard Inform7 extension paradigm to install any components (ie. not hack the stock install). The “language” should conform to the proposed Inform Language standard (as does Vorple). The release mechanism should not require the user to do anything different than he/she would to release a normal Inform7 game via the stock IDE (or at least anything extensive).
The installation of a game for web-use should not require the programming of a full-up web-page, but be runnable by placing the files on the server and accessing the URL of an index.html page for the game. This is so that the end-user can hyperlink to it from another webpage (a great example of where this is necessary is geochching.com, which doesn’t allow even javascripts in its hosted pages.) I’d stay away from any exotic stuff on the host side, since some of this can’t be run on the “free” accounts that many authors favour. I think that basic HTML and Javascript should be fairly safe. I believe that this is what Vorple has done.
Hope this helps you a bit. You’ll notice that I’ve referenced Vorple a bit. I have to admit, the paradigm is a pretty well-thought-out one. I think this is the standard you’ll be forced to meet as a minimum.
Just wanted to thank you for your help.
Vorple certainly looks like the emerging standard for web-based adventures.
I’m going to get my games running and will let you know of any bugs I find.
I’m also looking forward to your future releases in which you make it even more seamless with Inform7.
I finally figured out why I was only having trouble with the interpreter part of the upload when hosting off dropbox.
Seems dropbox is a bit rough when it comes to creating subdirectories for mass uploaded files on the fly.
It missed the interpreter directory entirely on the initial mass upload and work fine when I went back, created the subdirectory and uploaded the missing files.
The hosting really is as simple as setting up VORPLE locally, doing a release, transferring that directory (suitably renamed) to your Dropbox “Public” Directory and making a public link to the index.html file.
That public link is what gets accessed via the web browser. It definitely works in Safari on a Mac. Will have a friend try it on his IE 8 and post again.
Bottom Line …
say “The adventure author rubs his hands in anticipation as he screams, ‘VORPLE LIVES, IT LIVES !!!’”.
(I’ve obviously a lot to learn about the Vorple Inform/Html programming “fusion”, but I think I can safely say it works and will be OK for now.
Would like to get it up and running on GitHub as well. GitHub allows me to revision control my work and that’s a good idea on a 7-game series.
That’ll take a bit of study, because it’s not as straight-forward as the dropbox method.)