When the combined image descriptions become too large, the Inform 6M62 Compiler will crash at the cBlorb stage. At least I think that is what is happening. Compiler finished with code 11 is the only error message.
There is probably a way to pack descriptions manually with blorbtool.py, but it seems like a lot of work.
code 11’s an Inform 6 message, I thought. What version are you using on what platform? I can compile your image-descriptions branch on Linux with Inform 6.34. But then I get a segfault on trying to cBlorb it. Weirder, with the cBlorb 1.2 I get along with gnome-inform7’s gtk3 branch, I don’t get a lot of info:
! cBlorb 1.2 [executing on Tuesday 6 April 2021 at 00:28.21]
! The blorb spell (safely protect a small object as though in a strong box).
! Auxiliary file: <Counterfeit Monkey.materials/Customs-Poster-Big.png> = <Customs Poster>
! Auxiliary file: <Counterfeit Monkey.materials/DCLbig.png> = <DCL Advertisement>
! Auxiliary file: <Counterfeit Monkey.materials/Atlantida.png> = <Atlantida Poster>
Segmentation fault
Building the cBlorb source from github, though, I get:
Counterfeit Monkey.inform/Release.blurb, line 18: Error: not a valid blurb command: 'picture 3 "Counterfeit Monkey.materials/Figures/grey-nw.png" "dim northwest"'
Counterfeit Monkey.inform/Release.blurb, line 19: Error: not a valid blurb command: 'picture 4 "Counterfeit Monkey.materials/Figures/grey-n.png" "dim north"'
[...]
Counterfeit Monkey.inform/Release.blurb, line 75: Error: not a valid blurb command: 'picture 60 "Counterfeit Monkey.materials/Figures/map-sigil-street.png" "A city map
made out of letters in different typefaces. The player location is marked with an At sign at Sigil Street near the southwest corner of the map."'
Counterfeit Monkey.inform/Release.blurb, line 76: Error: placeholder text too long
Counterfeit Monkey.inform/Release.blurb, line 76: Error: not a valid blurb command: 'picture 61 "Counterfeit Monkey.materials/Figures/map-ampersand-bend.png" "A city ma
p made out of letters in different typefaces. The player location is marked with an At sign at Ampersand Bend near the southwest corner of the map."'
Segmentation fault
The Windows IDE at least offers the following stack trace:
Process failed, stack backtrace:
Exception code 0xc0000005
cblorb!write_blorb_file() at cBlorb\Chapter 2\Blorb Writer.w line 509
cblorb!main() at cBlorb\Chapter 1\Main.w line 104
cblorb!__tmainCRTStartup() at \usr\src\debug\mingw64-x86_64-runtime-7.0.0-1\crt\crtexe.c line 341
cblorb!mainCRTStartup() at \usr\src\debug\mingw64-x86_64-runtime-7.0.0-1\crt\crtexe.c line 225
KERNEL32!BaseThreadInitThunk()
ntdll!RtlUserThreadStart()
The referenced line is: if (chunk->index_entry) { ... }. Poking at it with a debugger shows that an invalid chunk_metadata structure does somehow manage to sneak into the list, but as of now I have no idea how it gets there.
gnome-inform7’s cBlorb code is apparently more recent than this cBlorb github repo: the latter doesn’t have the resource descriptions added in 2014. So there’s nothing useful to be gleaned from my second block of error messages above.
David Griffith’s GitLab cBlorb repository seems to be a little more recent, last updated in September 2015.
EDIT 2: Nope, the GitLab and Github repos are identical.
EDIT: This seems to produce the same error messages as your Github build, unlike the built-in version.
It is of course entirely possible that this is all caused by some copy-and-paste error of mine in the Counterfeit Monkey source code, but after having looked through the relevant commit several times, I can’t seem to find anything.