There is no cursor with Parchment, but wouldn’t it be useful to have a bold and black Cursor with KeyDelay ()?
When there is a pause and there is no cursor or prompt, there is no indication to the player that he must press a key to continue. If there was, at that time, a bold and black Cursor, it would know that it must or can do it.
Frotz or other interpreters:
You come down from the mountain by the small path █
Parchment:
You come down from the mountain by the small path
I’m not asking that there be a cursor everywhere and at any time with Parchment, but only for KeyDelay() function.
I have thought that it would be helpful to have some sort of indicator. I don’t like the idea of a flashing cursor, but I did think a textual notification saying something like “waiting for your input”, displayed only after 10 seconds, would be helpful.
Note that Parchment is kind of stagnant at the moment. I’m moving towards incorporating GlkOte for the display module, so if you or anyone did want to add something like this, I’d recommend submitting a pull request to GlkOte.
I can try to put, only for the Parchment version, an arrow or direction Unicode character at the end of my character string, to mean that the player must press a key; I can try, and if it’s ugly I won’t put anything and the player will wait!
Ah! This makes me think I have something to ask about the default message “Time passes”, but this is not the place.
What the cursor looks like is the domain of the interpreter. If it bugs you, you can move it somewhere else. During gameplay in robotfindskitten, I move the cursor to the upper right corner of the terminal just before waiting for input. Early on I noticed that leaving the cursor on the robot would sometimes result in the robot looking more like a solid block instead of # depending on how the interpreter decided the cursor should look.