Due to a fall about a week ago, and a resulting broken arm, I found myself with some time on my hands to revisit an old project. I had been attempting to recreate the ‘transcript’ from the Lurking Horror in ZIL. I had most of the game completed, along with a few ‘artistic licence’ additions to cover things not in the transcript that the player may attempt or to enhance things to prevent the ‘I don’t know that’ type responses. The final part of the game was to add sound similar to the original game. After a number of disappointing attempts, where I could not get any sound at all, I eventually had some success using gblorb and audacity and some common licence sound files. I managed to create a ‘blb’ file and hook it in to the game and ‘call’ those sound by ‘stripping out’ some of the sound code from the original game and tweaking it to work for the transcript game. The original game is v3 and my transcript is v5 and uses the extended call back function to fire a routine when a sound completes. I am not sure what I am going to do with it yet, I may release the source somewhere if anyone is interested, but I was wondering if I could get some feed back on the actual game for me to change/bug fix/enhance it before I release it somewhere. Many Thanks - Andy G : Here is the googledrive link LurkingTranscript - it contains the Z5 game file and the corresponding blb file (sound).
What do you mean regarding transcripts?
I assume the sample transcript in the manual. (https://infodoc.plover.net/manuals/temp/lurking.pdf page 4.)
Correct - this was based on exactly that transcript. It was just a bit of an exercise in ZIL really. I had seen other versions of IF that took one of these transcripts and tried to recreate them (not sure if they used ZIL though). I thought it would be a good one to attempt as I enjoyed the original game. I had done some ZIL coding before and this would allow me to delve into sound, which is something I had not tried.
Is it just me or does sound not work in Gargoyle? I am making my own game with a blorb file that I made and the Gargoyle sounds always come out very distorted, where they work in Windows Frotz.
I used both Windows Frotz and Gargoyle to test the Transcript attached and both played the sounds with no issues. I did not notice any deterioration on the Gargoyle sound compared to that of Frotz.
Huh, that’d strange! How did you build them? Mine start fine on Gargoyle, and then emit some crazy screechy random garbage throughout.
(My phone does not like allowing me access, I ask for it, I get given access, then when I try to reopen it says I have no access. Thanks though!)
The original sounds were taken from https://pixabay.com/. Most of these are mp3 format so I used Audacity to import the sound file. I the cut the sample to get rid of unwanted whitespace (silence at beginning or end of sample and to ‘chop’ it shorter if needed) and mixed it to mono before exporting the file as a signed 8bit AIFF mono sample with a low sample rate (I think I chose 8000hz). Originally, this did not seem to work as any attempt to call the sound in ZIL (although it would compile) would produce no sound at all. So, I checked the samples from the original Lurking Horror game blb file and found that the exported ones from Audacity contained an extra “FORM” header. Using notepad++ I removed that header and resaved the file before creating the ‘blorb’ file using the gblorb.ulx program within Gargoyle. Once I had placed that blb file into the working folder of my z5 game - I was able to call the sound from ZIL and play it back correctly.
I’m always in favor of more ZIL source being released to the wild.