Version 0.7.0 – updates that make you go “whoa, that’s fast!”
[taps mic] Hello? Is this thing still on?
This update should mostly fix, or at least delay, the slowdowns in the Gtk/Linux version that @jjmcc noted here. On my machine, the new version runs through the walkthrough of ‘Race against Time’ in about seven seconds, down from over a minute on the previous version. As a last resort, I have also added a ‘Clear Screen’ option that gets rid of all text and should restore performance.
(Edit: I should note that this update also has some new download options for Linux users, so you may want to re-read the Readme.)
(This update also contains a bunch of code and changes related to Gargoyle integration, which is now essentially complete on the FrankenDrift side. What remains to be done is all the boring fiddly build system adjustments that I couldn’t be bothered with for now…)
Note 2024-08-26: the Mac builds have been recompiled and re-issued with different build settings so they should no longer crash on startup.
I’m wondering if Frankendrift is now the best way to play Adrift games with a screen reader. The standard Adrift Runner is not accessible for screen readers, the web runner is accessible, but it regularly loses my save data (probably due to deleted cookies). Frankendrift seems to be half-accessible: It doesn’t work with Jaws, but it kind of works with NVDA. You just have to tab from the input to the output every time and use object navigation to move through the text, which is very unusual for IF interpreters. Has any other blind person tried this? Is there an easier way? Or, even simpler, would it be possible to have a raw command-line interpreter which strips away almost everything (maps, images, fonts, sounds …) and which runs as a command-line application?
Edit: Is the Frankendrift UI just on top of a simple text input-output program? Or is the UI more essential to the application? How easy or hard would it be to tear out the whole UI and just leave the text input/output?
It’s a Python script that uses Pywinauto to retrieve the FrankenDrift output and sets the input. This way, you can play Adrift games on the command line.
This is mostly for my own use, because I wanted to play Adrift games with a screen reader, and there is currently no way to do that offline on Windows. This is definitely not the official, correct way to make Adrift accessible for the blind, and it will break with the slightest update to FrankenDrift, but I thought maybe it will help somebody else in the meantime.
It should be possible to hook up the Glk version of Frankendrift to cheapglk for a console version, though changing Glk libraries with Frankendrift isn’t quite as simple as it is for most other Glk-based interpreters, and it may require a little bit of tailored code.
I’m also intending to get Frankendrift into Parchment, in which case the browser’s usual screen reading capabilities will hopefully make it quite accessible.
Even better, just a version with the standard Windows GLK library would work well with NVDA’s Interactive Fiction Interpreter add-on, although a console version on Windows and/or Linux (which could be ran from WSL) would be nice as well.
That, or write a small console frontend directly in C# (which would be a bit more straightforward to maintain and distribute, I think).
We do have a WinGlk adaptation that we put together as a proof-of-concept while working on the Glk interface. IIRC its missing some resources (icons and such) that WinGlk expects to find, but it technically works.