About the play online button for Adrift games:
Adrift 4 games are mostly incompatible with the WebRunner so I have started to look at the best rated Adrift 4 games on IFDB to find the best solution for each game. In some cases it is better to remove the play online button than to have the player think the game is bugged when it is just played with the wrong interpreter.
Example: Following the walkthrough for Give Me Your Lunch Money, you run into problems already at move 3 when you try to OPEN BOX. I checked with the Adrift 4 Runner where it works.
However, I stopped after 5 games because I just want to make sure I don’t go against IFDB policies. Here is what I have done so far:
Give Me Your Lunch Money 2010:
3rd command in walkthrough gives error - can’t open box
ACTION: Now link goes to game on adrift-site so “play online”-button gone for this game
Marika the offering:
Works well with webrunner
ACTION: Added v1.1. to download links - keeps Play Online button
EDIT: Submitted v1.1 to IF Archive as it is a zipped file so it can run with Parchment
Pirate’s Plunder!
All 3 download links broken, thus removed
ACTION: Added zip-link to Delron, thus currently no online button
No walkthrough so problem may not exist (but probably)
A Fine Day for Reaping
Bugs with webrunner, e.g.: Can’t leave kitchen with normal commands etc.
ACTION: Replaced download with a newer version and play online button gone as it should for this game
EDIT: Uploaded v1.2(zip-file) to IF Archive so that it can run with Parchment
Unauthorized Termination
WebRunner runs v1.00 - no version is compatible
Move 40 in walkthrough fails - works in Adrift 4 Runner
ACTION: Reordered files so newest version on top.
ACTION: Said v1.00 is “all formats” to get rid of Play Online button
It would be nice if someone on IFDB could confirm that this is okay, as I know you put a lot of effort into making the Play Online button work for Adrift. I am only getting rid of it for games that cannot be completed with WebRunner.
Scare is much better for Adrift 4 so that would be excellent, though I am not sure about graphics and sound, which may be ignored(?). It only works for Adrift 4 games (and probably 3.9 and 3.8) but not Adrift 5 games.
The question is then if you can make IFDB figure out if the game is Adrift 5 or Adrift 4. This is clear from the IFID but I am not sure if IFDB can read the IFID before deciding which interpreter to use?
Great initiative. However, several of them are Adrift 4 games which might cause problems. For instance, “A Fine Day for Reaping” has serious issues in WebRunner and also “Unauthorized Termination” and probably a lot more. “Cursed” and “Ghost Town” also have serious issues I remember. The longer the game, the greater the risk that the Adrift 5 parser is incompatible with the Adrift 4 game.
I will put my efforts on hold until we know if Dannii can implement Scare in Parchment and if IFDB can read IFID before selecting an interpreter. However, I might keep testing the games to check compatibility in the meantime. Those few Adrift 4 games that might work well in WebRunner and has graphics and sound may be better of with WebRunner. I’ve only heard of a single serious parser issue with Scare, which I think was in Gargoyle.
Would it be possible to just change the extension used for adrift 5 games to something like blorb5? I feel like that would only require minor adjustments to the runner
On each game link, there’s a setting for what kind of file it is. If you click on your link, edit it, check “This is a playable game file or it contains a playable game”, the “File Type” section offers these options for ADRIFT:
ADRIFT 3.8
ADRIFT 3.9
ADRIFT 4
ADRIFT 5
ADRIFT 5/Blorb
… as well as other options for other systems.
There are 508 games in the system:adrift search right now, and I’m sure we could go through and tag them all correctly over the course of a few days or weeks.
As for “reading” the IFID, IFDB never scans the files directly, but users can paste the IFID directly into IFDB.
So I think the process would look like this:
Somebody cooks a solid ADRIFT 4 web player (and/or 3.8/3.9), most likely by adding Scare support to Parchment.
We’d go through all 508 ADRIFT games, double check that their links work, and run the Babel tool on them, then set the File Type to the correct ADRIFT version. (I might even be able to automate this.)
I’d update the IFDB “Play On-line” button to send ADRIFT 5 games to the adrift.co WebRunner, and send ADRIFT 4 games to the other thing.
Sounds like a good plan
Let me know if I should help with point 2 in case you can’t automate it. I will try to find some time to keep testing the games with walkthroughs anyway, as many people may still try to play Adrift 4 games with the downloadable Adrift 5 Runner which has the same parser as the WebRunner.
IMO, the big step is Step 1! If you could work with @Dannii on getting Scare wired up into Parchment, that would be huge.
EDIT: But, truth be told, maybe it would be even better to work with @ArdiMaster on getting FrankenDrift to work on the web with Blazor. The adrift.co WebRunner is suuuuper slow, because every time you type a command, it sends the request to adrift.co, which then processes the result and sends it back. It would be way better to have a web player that ran entirely in the user’s browser, which is the way Parchment works.
I’d like to help both @Dannii and @ArdiMaster but currently, I don’t have the skill - I haven’t really worked with any modern programming languages except for a little C# in Visual Studio. I hope to learn and can probably help with testing. However, the next 14 days I am pretty hung up but feel free to ask anyway.
Some nice-to-have improvements:
(all issues below found playing Finn Rosenløv’s Ghost Town - Adrift 4 game in Parchment - link below)
When I save/restore, I see save-files from other games. I don’t think this normally happens with Parchment.
When I open Ghost Town by Finn Rosenløv with Parchment (follow link below), I get the title picture which is good. However, subsequent pictures are not shown (most locations in the beginning have location graphics). I was thinking, that if the first picture could be shown, the rest could too. Not a big deal but would be great.
The first is a difference with how Emglken works. Eventually I’ll improve it.
The second is a limitation of Scare - Parchment should operate just like Gargoyle does. I have no intention to work on Scare itself, but if anyone else wants to improve it then I’ll pull in the updates.
I tested the Parchment interpreter on several ADRIFT 4 games and an Adrift 3.8 game and they all work well.
I don’t know if you want to continue the process or wait for the implementation of Frankendrift into Parchment?
If you prefer to wait, I might change a few listings on IFDB temporarily so that the first “download link” is a link to the game using Parchment and so we get rid of the “Play Online” button temporarily for ADRIFT 4, 3.9 and 3.8 games if that is okay. I can quickly change those back.
I hadn’t realised that some Adrift 5 games are published as .taf files. This will complicate matters slightly, as multi-interpreters won’t be able to rely on file extensions to determine which interpreter to use.
Also, what is going on with their IFIDs? Skybreak’s is “ADRIFT-500-FF82-4AFC-415A-9042-AA5CDF8A1462”! It’s based on a UUID, but the first 4 hex digits are replaced with only 3 digits of the version number. At least there’s a prefix so that it won’t be confused for a true UUID based IFID.
The Babel spec needs to be updated to explain about Adrift 5. And the Babel tool probably needs to be updated too.
IFDB could probably consolidate some of these Adrift file types. The only thing we really need to distinguish is between Adrift <5 and 5. Though if in the future all the interpreters we recommend (Parchment, Lectrote, Gargoyle, Spatterlight) support all the files via Scare and Frankendrift, then maybe it wouldn’t be even be necessary to distinguish the file types.
