Sorry I wasn’t able to work this out through searching, but:
Are games with graphics using the the glimmr framework supported by any browser interpreters?
If not, more generally, do I have any options for animation/semi-advanced graphics using Inform 7?
I have basically searched and searched and come up with ‘I have no idea’. I’m open even to the weirdest, kludgy-est of workarounds – I had actually always thought, even before glimmr, that inform had some basic support for animation, but perhaps I was imagining this.
Not yet. The main browser interpreter for Glulx games is Quixe/Parchment, and it doesn’t do graphics yet.
You mean online? If you want real graphics, you have to go more advanced – like javascript advanced – that is to say you have to wrap your game in Vorple (vorple-if.com/) or something like that.
Re: kludgy workarounds. You could probably do some kind of ascii character animation in a textgrid window. That’s the first crappy idea that popped in my head. There are no workarounds involving genuine graphics that will work in an online interpreter at this time.
Re: #1, is there any indication such a thing is on the guessable horizon? I mean, I do know know these things tend to happen when they happen, but I’m wondering if that ‘not yet’ is closer to ‘not yet, maybe in a year’ or a ‘not yet, possibly not in your lifetime, who knows?’.
Re: kludgy workarounds, I was actually sort of wondering if an Inform 7 game running in Parchment could be coaxed into interacting with – I’m actually not sure what. A… database or google spreadsheet or some other sort of thing that could be read by some more graphically oriented, uh…
Okay, this is crazy non-programmer talk. Disregard.
I know only the tiniest smidgen of javascript, and so have been a little wary of Vorple (it seems like I’d be learning two things at once, between the javascript and the vorple-izing of it). It is maybe possibly within the realm of possibility that an approach involving Vorple’s handling of CSS and tiny amounts of CSS-animation would get me where I’m trying to go, though, so I thank you for the reminder of it. Eek.
Does Vorple have documentation lurking around somewhere, beyond what comes with the extensions and the tiny overview on its website?
The extensions’ documentation covers what the extensions provide on the Inform side, and anything more advanced inevitably involves pure JavaScript. So any documentation or tutorial would be almost completely indistinguishable from pure JavaScript documentation and the internet is full of them so I’ve decided not to write any more of those. Vorple-specific JS methods are documented here: vorple-if.com/vorple/release/doc/API/
Making animation depends on what kind of animation you had in mind. There’s video and animated gifs and sprite animation and CSS animation and SVG and…
This is looking like it might be beyond me at this time. Or at least, like the amount of effort I’d need to put into javascript would essentially amount to learning a new language for no great reason other than desire to keep using Inform, which seems like a questionable use of time in my specific case.