I’ve searched around for this on these forums and in r.a.i-f, but have come up empy.
You know those boxed, often reversed-text quotation blocks that show up in Trinity and many other infocom-style games? It used to be easy to replicate this behaviour: there was a ‘box’ command or some such that just printed it for you centered and overlaid on the transcript, and then the box would scroll up with the transcript. (If you didn’t place it carefully, it could easily obscure some previously printed text.)
I want to do that in my i7 game. Is there still an easy way, I hope?
See the built-in documentation ch. 5.12.
I vaguely remember that this effect is z-machine only, but I may well be wrong about that (there’s no note to the effect in the section on it.)
It works in Glulx too, although it doesn’t look exactly the same – the quotation appears in its own pane, rather than overlaid on the story window. (And disappears after the next input.)
BTW I hope since this is standard Infocom behaviour that it is supported on all terps. The note I was thinking of including in the box is an important one that I wouldn’t want anyone to miss…
It will be supported, except on a dumb-stream interpreter (like the ClubFloyd bot). What happens there is questionable. (But then, so is the entire status line.)
This made me cringe a bit, because I find those boxes annoying and tend to “click through” them very quickly, and they don’t show up on scrollback. So I’d encourage you to have the information available in a more lasting form as well, regardless of whether you trust the interpreter to support quote boxes.
Seconded. I don’t remember seeing a quotebox that didn’t have anything other than a random mood-setting quote, so at least to me a quotebox means pretty much the opposite of “important information”.
Thirded. Reliques of Tolti-Aph actually did put a clue in a quotebox, and it was so annoying. In addition to what Juhana and tove say, the quotebox shows up out of my main line-of-sight – I’m looking at the bottom, where the prompt is. The first time I played it I didn’t notice it had popped up at all. (They don’t display as prominently in Zoom as in Spatterlight, I think.)
[EDIT: I think I may have had an identical experience with Fail-Safe, although at the time I thought that my interpreter just hadn’t displayed the material in question.
I don’t remember the exact details, but I think you had to enter an access code that seemed like a username, and the menu options that you needed to end the game popped up in a box. When I didn’t see them, I thought I needed to find another code asa password. I couldn’t find it.
Boy, that was frustrating, even if it was probably my fault in retrospect.]
Fourthded, as far as in-world clues go. But this is an out-of-world note for friends and playtesters, not intended for the final release, so not to worry, peeps! I just wanted a method that would seem somewhat removed from the main transcript while altering the look and feel of the opening screen as little as possible. If I could just make it an OS dialog box, I would.
I didn’t end up using this method for my playtester’s note: the text grew too large and I ended up having to blast it into the main scroll area, followed by a Yes/No question and then the the proper start of the game. Ah, well. I should have predicted I’d bust the comfortable confines of the box with my interminable verbiage. 87