Every Adventuron game has (or should have) a UUID defined in the game_information{} section. Under the Treaty of Babel, all modern works of interactive fiction should have an Interactive Fiction ID (or IFID), which is, in fact, a UUID. This is used to uniquely identify a game and can be used in databases such as the one on IFDB.
So, how do you extract the UUID from a compiled Adventuron game? I did a search for the known UUID in one of my games and couldn’t find it, so I guess that it’s compressed or encoded or obfuscated in some way.
I think it’s accepted these days to just use a unique, compliant ID. Dialog’s manual just flat out says to use a random number from the Dialog site and I haven’t noticed anybody squawk. The treaty doc says to just use the md5 hash for generic stuff, which I believe is what I did with Ghost King.
Yes, that’s true. I guess I should have said that a UUID is recommended, as this is guaranteed to be unique. Anyway, Adventuron enforces a UUID, as it uses this to uniquely identify saved games in the browser’s cache, but you can’t see it anywhere in the compiled game. Maybe there’s a way of finding it in the browser.
The uuid is not found by a simple text search as adventuron games are encoded into JSON then textually compressed when packaged as standalone html files. I do have control over packaging so I can pluck out the uuid as plain text without too much hassle. It won’t work retrospectively unfortunately.
So we can’t enter the IFID on IFDB (unless you’re the author, of course). Even if we did, it would be pretty meaningless to anyone, because they wouldn’t be able to extract it or confirm it in any way.
I can’t change things for games already published without writing a tool to extract the UUID because the UUID is encoded in the compressed data. I can change things for new games.