Images

Authoring Inform 7
1

Hiya!

So the ASCII thing looks cool but isn’t working out.

If I make images available in my game, and the image is too big to fit in the interpreter window, will interpreters rescale accordingly or will they leave it huge (and thus partly cropped)?

Also, can centering work in each interpreter? I ask for both text and images.

Any interpreters I should focus on due to their popularity?

I use windows, Glulxe (and Frotz). Game file will be a .gblorb

Any help welcome, including with questions I don’t know yet I want answered.

Thanks in advance.

2

Glulx is pretty much the way to go for any sort of IF with data files or any multimedia such as graphics (images) and sound.

I do not know what the in-the-box behavior is for larger-than-view images. It might allow scrolling or it might crop. If it doesn’t scroll in a window out of-the-box it might be possible to implement scrolling images with a viewport window and some glulx code (there are extensions that do sprites thus it’s possible to move an image around which may allow panning the non-visible parts into view making scroll bar or mouseover scrolling possible).

3

In my iFrotz terp, I’ve actually seen pictures get cropped AND pictures get resized. AND I’ve seen some pictures get resized to a size too small.

I’m not entirely sure what’s going on, but I guess it has to do with the state of Glulx at the time the games were written and, possibly, some choices the authors made. I don’t know how the desktop terps behave, maybe they inforce a one-size-fits-all and redimension everything…

…but on the whole, if you want huge pictures, you’re basically taking a risk. Though, not nearly as big as you were taking with the ASCII art!

4

You can find examples for how to use images with Inform 7 in Chapter 23 of the Writing with Inform documentation.

As Peter noted, multimedia support is dependent on what the interpreter provides. There is at least one GLK (Glulx) implementation for each platform: Windows, Linux, Mac, mobile. And different GLK versions (old interpreters were compiled with old versions). Depending on platform and GLK version, interpreters have different behaviour. There are some Glulx flags to test for gross capabilities such as images yes/no, sound yes/no.