I’ve spent the weekend ramping up development on quixe-channels. The actual VM is still under a fork from zarf’s Github work, but the extensions and example projects (Inform 7 and web) will be at:
github.com/ChicagoDave/quixe-channels
I revamped the original FyreVM extention to be the Core and removed any game specific cruft I had in there. I also added some basics, like the I7 boolean value “outputting channels” to determine if you’re writing to channel IO or not. This allows me (you?) to write extensions that work in “standard” mode and in channel IO mode.
I started breaking down the banner information and realized this is really story info. The actual banner output for non channel IO stories is a separate thing and a separate extension. So Quixe Channels Story Info provides a JSON object with all the story information.
I copied the Cloak of Darkness project and made small changes for channel IO. This is about as simple an example as you might get, which is good. It will show the basics.
I did note that implicit action reporting escapes my ability to tag in a specific channel (it defaults to the main channel if not specified). I’d like to get help reporting all implicit actions to a new channel, “Explicit Actions Channel” or “EXAC”.
I plan to add the web side of Cloak in an Angular 1.x project next.
I also noted that cblorb is an archaic process and although it does what it needs to do, there are more things it (or something else) could do. I almost want to say that Inform 7 needs to adopt a build process tool like Gulp or something. Even so, I’ll probably build my own tool to “take over after I7 compiles” using a watcher task. This is pretty common in the JS world and should be easy to demonstrate.
Not sure if I plan to blog about this or not. For now I’m reporting progress here…
David C.