IF engine for filesystem-style interface?

Technical Development Interpreters
1

Hey guys! Finally registered, despite lurking for a long time, because I have a question I can’t seem to find an answer to.

Is there an IF engine with a good interface that emulates filesystem-style terminal commands? Or an add-on for existing IF interpreters? To be specific, I’m looking for one that emulates commands like cd…, ls, who, login, etc. Things you might enter at a DOS or Unix command prompt.

Thanks!

2

nadvsh.sourceforge.net/

Probably not what you meant, but still pretty cool :slight_smile:

3

Do you want to perform actual commands on your filesystem, or provide fictional ones in a game-world computer?

4

Fictional commands on a game-world computer. Things like typing “dir” and getting a list of all files in the current fictional computer folder.

5

You can do that with virtually every IF system.

6

Yeah, you’re going to be more specific. There are numerous extensions or game examples written that do this very thing, written for a variety of game development platforms.

7

I don’t know of any Inform 7 extension that would do this out of the box, but it doesn’t sound like something that would be too complicated to program if you just want stuff like “ls” to work. Of course, you’d need to do some work with indexed text and regular expression if you want to allow more complicated commands like “ls r*”.

8

Offhand, the Emily Short extension for I7 “Computers” is designed with a modern GUI interface in mind.

I don’t know what games specifically simulate DOS or Linux or other prompt-based filesystems. I’m sure there’s some out there that you could use for examples.

At the very least, you could mock up a list of common commands and make one up yourself. I wouldn’t think it would be difficult to simulate.

9

You’re talking about a command-line user interface. The filesystem has nothing to do with it.

10

I wanted to distinguish the command-line interface of IF games from the command-line interface of filesystem browsers.

Thanks for directing me to the Emily Short extension! Will take a look. I was working on my own extension for it, but I’d rather use an existing one if it is good enough.

11

Emily’s is basically a text description of what a modern computer is like. LOL.