I haven’t revisited Narcolepsy in a long time. Back in those days I was running Windows, and I remember that the advice for playing Glulx games was to use WinGit for speed and WinGlulxe for maximum compatibility. I remember that WinGlulxe correctly displayed the dream bubble graphic on the right, and WinGit did not. Nowadays I use Gargoyle on Linux & BSD platforms, and neither the Glulxe nor the Git terp will show the bubble.
What’s going on with this? Does that effect use some obscure part of the standard that most interpreters can’t handle? Is it a configuration problem? Are there any other interpreters that show Narcolepsy correctly?
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Having never played it, I didn’t know what ‘correctly’ would mean, until I tried Spatterlight and it became obvious that this was correct. So on a Mac, Spatterlight can show it.
It seems quite a bizarre effect. The transparent part of the game window shows my desktop through it. I haven’t seen that in another IF.
-Wade
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Spatterlight must be cheating. You can paint partially transparent PNGs onto a graphics window in Glk, but the window starts white (or another colour). Transparent windows that show the desktop underneath aren’t part of Glk, and would just be impossible in some interpreters (like Parchment.)
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Spatterlight must be cheating.
Definitely cheating. Narcolepsy comes with a file named narco.cfg, which Windows Glulxe reads and uses to set the window size, preferred font, and which image to use as window mask, making parts of the game window transparent. This was clearly the way the author intended the game to look.
I thought the window mask thing was kind of cool, and it was easy to implement, so Spatterlight simply detects Narcolepsy and applies the mask. It does not bother with the .cfg file.
There are a couple of other games out there, such as Photopia, that also have a .cfg file which sets a window mask, but they just seem to use a square mask which makes the window slightly smaller.
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So I guess the effect is non-standard, and Adam Cadre just created it specifically for WinGlulxe. Thanks for the information!
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