Online play for Adrift and IFDB

[Denk (Kenneth Pedersen)]

@Dannii

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.

Yes, for some reason all IFIDs of ADRIFT games are like that, e.g. a 3.8 game:
ADRIFT-380-54F4647A8C9C708CD163CABEF08E1A26

@Dannii

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.

True. So for IFDB, all ADRIFT games should go to Parchment once Frankendrift is added to it. So no reason to do a complicated intermediate step to distinguish between the different types on IFDB.

[Dannii]

@Dannii

This will complicate matters slightly, as multi-interpreters won’t be able to rely on file extensions to determine which interpreter to use.

The version number is stored in the file header, and though it needs a little bit of decoding, we’d really only need to look at one byte to determine which interpreter to use.

I’ve submitted a pull request to update the Babel spec. Its description of Hugo IFIDs was also not right.

[Denk (Kenneth Pedersen)]

@dfabulich , on second thought, there is no need to change anything on IFDB until we have Frankendrift implemented in Parchment. I just realized that with some manual labor I can make the play online button work with Parchment just by doing it as done here:
Trick or Treat - Details (ifdb.org)

No one is making Adrift 4 games anymore so I think this solution is fine for now.

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

@Dannii

I’ve submitted a pull request to update the Babel spec. Its description of Hugo IFIDs was also not right.

I’ve merged this.

Do we think that’s all the spec changes needed for this round? If so, I can call it “revision 12” and push it out.

[Dannii]

That’s all the changes I can think of right now. I was hoping to be able to say at what byte offset the Adrift 5 iFiction record is, but I haven’t been able to work out if it’s a fixed or variable offset.

Though thinking for the future, I wonder if it would be helpful to have a distinct section for how to search files for an embedded IFID. Z-Code and Glulx would say to just scan the file, Hugo would explain about de-obfuscating, Adrift would specify whatever the iFiction offset is, TADS would explain its non-iFiction metadata format (or just reference the TADS docs). The legacy IFIDs section would then only need to explain how to generate legacy IFIDs.

Edit: for example, nothing in the Babel spec says that for Alan you should scan the file. You’d only know by checking the babel-tool source code.