First of all, If you want to save the entire output of the game as plain text, I would recommend that you type SCRIPT at the command prompt instead.
I tried the Save Scrollback menu item in the latest version, and it seems to work as it should, but again, if the game clears all text from the screen, which games often do, usually for dramatic effect, then the scroll back is cleared too, and there is nothing left to save. This is the way this function always has worked.
I’m still working on making it available from every window, though.
The Save Scrollback/Transcript function should be the same apart from the name. Have you tried both the old and the new versions of Spatterlight with the same game? To me, the functionality seems to be identical.
Here is today’s update. It makes Save Scrollback work with grid windows.
It is also an attempt to implement @Morningstar’s idea that the last move should be spoken whenever a text view gets focus. This kind of works now, as long as the keyboard focus and VoiceOver cursor are set to synchronize in the VoiceOver utility. The main exception is the Game windows rotor, which now will always read the entire buffer window contents from the top, once when selected in the rotor, and then once again when leaving the rotor.
Note that this update will break old autosaves, so make sure to save any games in progress with standard save files before running it.
This release adds two VoiceOver-specific settings, available on the new VO preferences tab.
Speak commands: When this is switched off, Spatterlight will no longer speak entered commands during normal play. Also, keys and words entered in the Bureaucracy form will not be spoken. If the “While typing speak” setting in VoiceOver Utility is set to Nothing, there will be no VoiceOver feedback at all while typing commands, except that the first character is still spoken for some reason. Entered commands will still be spoken in the Command history rotor.
Speak menu lines: The new default behaviour when navigating a menu is Text only: Only the actual text of the line will be spoken, not its index in the menu or the total number of lines. When the menu is first detected, these numbers will still be read once, along with the title of the menu and instructions for navigation. All of these except the title will also be read when the current line is repeated with the Repeat last move action. Menu detection can now also be switched off entirely.
I like this a lot–the readout is short and to the point, and even while using the window navigation rotor it is relatively easy to keep track of my progress via the command history.
On a completely unrelated note, I’ve found a couple more ways to make Spatterlight crash with fatal errors; both of these came up in Graham Nelson’s 1996 The Meteor, the Stone, and a Long Glass of Sherbet, which I was prompted to test out after seeing another post on this forum regarding issues with that particular game. The first is triggered when typing “examine her”–referring to the NPC that accompanies the player at the very beginning of the story. The second instance occurs when attempting to pick up one of several identical objects much later on (I have a save set up right around the point at which this happens.)
This is another minor update that fixes a number of VoiceOver-related bugs. Also fixes “The Meteor, The Stone And A Long Glass Of Sherbet,” for real this time.
The Game windows rotor no longer speaks the window type before speaking the content of the window.
This release improves support for Z-code quote boxes, introduced in Trinity and seen in Curses and many other games. These will now be displayed (for one turn) as separate text views, detached from the status bar. They will be spoken by VoiceOver when shown and are added to the Game windows rotor.
Also adds VoiceOver support for the help menu in the original 1998 freeware release of Anchorhead.
a small but positive change I’ve noticed: with these past couple of releases speech feedback seems to be a bit snappier. In the past Voiceover would pause for around half a second or so before it began reading text output when I entered a new command (this tended to happen most often with larger games such as Curses.)
That is great to hear, though I really have no idea what may have changed. I haven’t given a lot of thought to performance lately. Let me know if things get slow again. In the past I’ve had reports about responses slowing down when the scrollback grows big.
Another quick note: when the “speak commands” setting is switched off, Voiceover does not read back typed commands while navigating with the history rotor unless I select a relevant chunk of text output. This isn’t a very big deal for me, but I thought I should say something since the release notes mentioned that commands were still supposed to be spoken automatically.
That is deliberate. I just forgot to mention it in the new release notes. It turned out to be easy to do, and I figured that if you didn’t like the commands read back to you during normal play you wouldn’t want them in the history rotor either. If you don’t like it, perhaps I could add another setting or maybe just change it back?