fizmo 0.7

Version 0.7 of the console-based fizmo Z-Machine interpreter can now be found at spellbreaker.org/~chrender/fizmo/.

The new version implements Frank Liangs hy-phen-a-tion algorithm and comes with patterns — and locales — for english, french and german. In case there’s babel information available, for example through the .(z)blorb file itself, setting the tag to a value like “en”, “fr” or “de” will make the interpreter automatically use the correct localized hyphenation patterns and messages. Thanks to Eric Forgeot for the french localization.

Thanks to Andrew Plotkin, there’s now a GLK-interface available, along with a glktermw-based example. While Andrew kindly built the initial version, I’m guilty of all errors and bugs the final experimental fizmo-integration, which means that you should send problem reports to me, not to zarf.

In case the “save-text-history-paragraphs” option is set to some number greater than zero, the corresponding amount of recently displayed paragraphs is written into the savegames and re-displayed upon restore. I found this to be quite useful to get an idea of the state the game was in when loading a savegame. Since the text is not compressed when saving, this will make savegames considerably larger.

More information about changes can be found in the file “README-0.7.txt” from the new package.

In more technical related news, the X11-frontispiece display should now be actually usable, since the image is no longer written into the terminal window itself, but into a separate X-Window. The old behaviour is still available, but not recommended. Furthermore, it will suffice to have libjpg and/or libpng installed to read images, there’s no longer a requirement to have GTK installed.

There are no binary packages available (yet), so at the moment the new version has to be build from source. Information about build requirements can be found in the “INSTALL.txt” file. For easier building, pkg-config is now used whereever possible.

Any Comments, suggestions, bug reports and so on are appreciated.