For an Inform 7 game that uses Glulx sound, what options are there for making the game (including the sound) playable online?
Is creating a Vorple version of the game the best way? If so, any tips on how best to convert an existing game to a Vorple version?
What options are there for hosting it?
Vorple is the only option for now. I intend to add sound support to Parchment, it just hasn’t been a priority.
Vorple has been great to work with on my first project and it’s super easy to set up. You can just run a local server (Setting up a local server for Vorple · Vorple) to emulate how the game would play on a website and then try something like itch to host for free. After fiddling around with the commands for a bit, it becomes pretty apparent what you need to do to get your sounds to work.
Thank you!
Does anyone know if it is better to have two different releases (the original version of the game for offline play, and an online version that uses Vorple), or if it is better–or even possible–to have one release that works both online with Vorple and offline without Vorple?
Yes, you can use the same release. (Technically, you’ll end up with two files – one standard .gblorb for offline play, and one .gblorb.js for online play. But you can generate them from one and the same source file/project.)
Vorple generally degrades gracefully, in the sense that if you’re playing on a normal offline interpreter, the Vorple features will not throw errors or break the game, they just won’t do anything.
Additionally, you can use “if Vorple is supported” in your code to check whether the player is running the game in a Vorple-supporting interpreter, and display warnings or alternative content as you deem fit.
One big advantage of this is of course that you don’t need to maintain two code bases. Otherwise, if you had two projects, you’d always have to copy over bugfixes, typo corrections etc. between them.
The only potential exception I could think of is if you planned to duplicate a lot of Vorple’s functionality with other means for offline interpreters, say for example with Glulx hyperlinks or Glulx images, something like that.
Then it might become a matter of individual judgment if you want to keep everything in one project, but have frequent checks “if Vorple is supported, do this thing; otherwise: do the Glulx thing”, which might become a bit unwieldy; or if you’d rather do one pure-Vorple and one pure-Glulx-non-Vorple project (even if this means dealing with duplicating bugfixes and all that).
If I recall correctly, if you intend to use sounds with Vorple, and sounds with regular Glulx/Glk (to have a game that works with both Vorple and regular interpreters), you’ll end up with twice the sounds in you project: one copy in the materials folder for Vorple, and one copy in the Sounds folder of the materials for regular terps.
It won’t affect the Blorb file (it won’t be twice as big) but it might be cumbersome to you as an author.
(See section “The Release button and the Materials folder” of chapter “Releasing”.)
Thanks, everybody!