Gargoyle and a large-scale WIP

Technical Development Interpreters
1

I have a large puzzle game this><far from completion.

Unfortunately, my testers are reporting that UNDO doesn’t work in Gargoyle across the board (Mac, Windows, or Linux). Mac Zoom and Windows Glulxe do appear to offer UNDO, but I know a lot of players default to Gargoyle, so I’d like to get the Gargoyle experience right there. As far as we can tell there are no Linux terps at all that run the game exactly as I would hope (reasonable turn speed, optional graphics displayed, and UNDO functional).

My best guess here is that Gargoyle is assigning a buffer for saving game-state that is too small, given a very big and fiddly world model. I could be wrong, but batting this around with people on ifMUD, it sounds like that might be the problem.

Are there any Gargoyle maintainers who would be up for having a look and who might be able to tweak the build if that is indeed the solution? I’d be happy to send over a copy of the game file, put your name in the credits, buy you a beer when we’re next at the same town/conference, etc.

2

On the face of it, this is a bit odd, as undo is handled by the Glulx interpreter layer, which in Gargoyle is just really the usual Glulxe or Git under the hood. Do you know which of the two testers have been using, and the interpreter versions (as reported by the in-game ‘version’ command)?

3

Related discussion on the garglk-dev mailing list:
groups.google.com/d/topic/gargl … discussion

It’s an issue with Git specifically; it allocates a fixed chunk of memory for undo records, and the current allocation is too small to support undo in this game.

4

It sounds from the garglk-dev thread that you and Ben can at least sort out a suitable size for the Git undo buffer - once that’s done I’ll push out a new Git release (and a build of Windows Git).

5

That would be very helpful. Thanks, both.