Glk 0.7.4

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

I have posted the Glk 0.7.4 spec to my web site: eblong.com/zarf/glk/

This includes filename suffix recommendations, and the call to read data from a Blorb chunk.

(This does not include the stylesheet stuff – that’ll be Glk 0.8, I suppose.)

CheapGlk 1.0.3 is updated to the new spec. (GlkTerm is not, yet.)

A unit test for the Blorb-reading call is also up: eblong.com/zarf/glulx/resstreamtest.gblorb

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

As discussed in the “Idea for fast setup in Inform games” thread…

I’ve just made a small, retroactive addition to the Glk 0.7.4 spec. I know, not supposed to do that. However, it doesn’t affect any existing games that I know of, and it will be a quick fix to existing Glk 0.7.4 libraries.

The nut is this added comment:

…The (Blorb) chunk type will be ‘TEXT’ for text resources, ‘BINA’ or ‘FORM’ for binary resources.

For a ‘FORM’ Blorb chunk, the stream should start reading at the beginning of the chunk header – that is, it should read the ‘FORM’ and length words before the chunk content. For ‘TEXT’ and ‘BINA’ chunks, the stream should skip the header and begin with the chunk content. This distinction is important when embedding AIFF sounds or Quetzal saved games, for example.

(Previous versions of the spec only mentioned TEXT and BINA. I’m adding FORM as a valid option.)

Implementation and updated unit test coming in a couple of days.

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

Sorry – my progress on this plan got blocked by a Quixe bug, and then I spent August on Hadean Lands work (and other secret project…)

Anyway, this change is now implemented in cheapglk, glkterm, and quixe. I’ve added it to the official Glk spec page (it was already on the wiki). The unit tests are resstreamtest and startsavetest, both posted at eblong.com/zarf/glulx/ .

I’ve pushed all of this to github, but I have not done any package releases. I’ll probably do a Quixe 1.3.0 soon, as I found more save/restore bugs there that I want to clean out.