Apparently, some interpreters have a feature that lets you record the commands you type and then use those commands to replay the game.
IFWiki mentions that Bocfel and CellarDoor have recording and playback.
I hadn’t heard of this feature until recently, and thought it sounded interesting. And it seems a little bit related to the readthrough mode idea people have been talking about. Maybe, given a list of commands, a player could run through the game without having to type each one.
I’m curious if players use this kind of feature, and whether any (maintained) Glulx interpreters do command recording and playback.
When I asked about this in that readthrough thread, a RECORD/REPLAY facility was mentioned as being part of Inform 6 (I guess the library? I don’t know much about Inform) rather than interpreters.
Poking some random recent I6 (non-PunyInform) works: both Monkeys and Car Keys (Z-code) and Oremus (which appears to be Glulx underneath the Vorple) support a REPLAY verb, which causes the interpreter to prompt for a file to load (but not a RECORD verb). And I guess it’s available in PunyInform too, since All That Shimmers… is the same.
On Glulx, this would most likely be implemented at the library level, since Glk has everything the game needs. Inform’s library implements it. ZILF’s standard library doesn’t include a verb to replay commands, but ZILF’s Glulx layer does implement the feature for the Infocom games that use it.
IIRC, record/replay were debugging verbs in the I6 library, which means that most games distributed in release mode didn’t have them enabled (like ‘purloin’ and ‘gonear’). But you could override this behavior if you wanted–I did it for ‘The Edifice’, partly so I could include ‘edifice.rec’ with the game as a playable walkthrough.
I7 handles this sort of debugging feature with new testing verbs, but they don’t work for meta-commands like ‘restart’ or ‘undo’. It’s one of the things I kind of miss.