Release Along With an Interpreter

I just right now got the email, so yours is probably coming. Have you tried adding “release along with an interpreter” in your code? I’m curious if your cover art looks awful, too, or if it’s just me.

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In what way does the cover art look awful? It will be shrunk, but that should look okay.

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When I open the play.html file, the cover art is cropped to a tiny sliver on the left side, with the hyperlink text “Game Name Home page” barely visible over it. It took me a while to see that the hyperlink was there. When I click on that, the cover art is all visible, but with a whole bunch of game info text over it so you can’t see the art or read the text. And below that are the links for “story file” and “play in browser.”

It looks so bad that I’ll have to take the cover art out to send it unless there’s a fix for that.

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None of the included images are working with the built-in interpreter.

Well, blargh. On the bright side, at least it’s not just me, which is pretty rare.

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Hmm, I’m not sure what’s up with the templates that would crop the cover rather than shrinking it. It’s meant to look like this (from here):

If your story uses images, then there’s an extra processing step. I don’t remember what the current recommendations are for that. It might be simplest to just skip using I7 to make the website, and instead to use ifsitegen.py.

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Thank you. But that thread is way above my pay grade. I have no idea whether to include that stuff in my code or where to find “unpack”… honestly, that’s Sanskrit. So I guess I’ll just either take the art out or not have it playable online.

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Honestly, the simplest way would be to simply link to it using iplayif.com, but I don’t know how that would fit with what Aaron wants for the festival…

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This is what mine looks like at first:

and after clicking on the hyperlink:

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One idea… did you create both “Cover.jpg” and “Small Cover.jpg” (or .png)? Maybe if you don’t provide the small cover it uses the big cover.

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They’re both there. I’ll try removing the big cover and see what happens.

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Removing the larger cover art file results in it using the default art, although it’s sized correctly.

ETA: I can’t remove the cover art without getting the default art. And I’m tired and going to bed, so I’m not ignoring any helpful replies. If I can’t have it playable online, then I can’t. It’s a bummer, but I’ll live.

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Hard to know exactly what’s wrong, but I suspect it’s not detecting the small cover for some reason.

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off topic, but nice cover art!

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Aw, shucks. Thanks.

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I’ve tried substituting another interpreter with the “Release with the ‘Gargoyle’ interpreter” line (adding gargoyle to the templates folder), and it simply breaks the release. Also that ifsitegen.py is entirely Greek to me. IMHO, I’m barely content with my game as is; I’m not willing to strip the images from it. Better fewer people play it as intended than more play it worse off.

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Agreed. It’s weird that this isn’t easy, but I gave it the old college try and I’m comfortable with failure here.

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What’s your exact release along with line, what figure of definitions do you have in your source, if any, what jpgs are in your project’s materials folder, and what jpgs are in the Figures folder under your project’s materials folder?

To work with the template, Cover.jpg and Small Cover.jpg must be in the materials folder and you must use release along with a cover image, an interpreter, and [...whatever else].

I wonder whether you might have your cover image under Figures and are manually displaying it when the game starts.

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In spite of Inform’s sort-of invitation to make an interpreter change from the IDE, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done. So I would not bother/worry about that.

I strongly suspect all your one (as opposed to Amanda’s) needs is the image-processing step. That step alone IS a big nuisance if you build your game via “Release along with an interpreter” and then seek to apply the step. The easiest way to do it now is to use ifsitegen.py, which does both at once. If you’d like me to run this script on your project (without even playing your game, and with me signing a verbal NDA publicly here for all to see, which I declare to be doing now!) and then send back the resulting files, I’d be happy to do that. PM me if you are interested.

-Wade

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It would probably be wise to take Wade up on his offer, because his method is surely easier than what I’m about to discuss (for those who know what they’re doing).

That said, there is a brute force workaround to process the images without any knowledge of Python or any other language they speak in Byzantium.

First, make sure you’ve set up everything correctly in the source:

Release along with an interpreter and cover art.
Figure of Whatever is the file “Whatever.png”.
Figure of Some Stuff is the file “Some Stuff.png”.
After doing whatever:
display the Figure of Whatever.

Then, generate a release, and open up play.html in a text editor (e.g. Notepad++). There will be a line that looks like this:

image_info_map: ‘StaticImageInfo’, // image data is here, not in blorb

The image_info_map part is where the images need to get referenced. Again, ifsitegen.py exists to make this easy, but if a person would rather do it manually, that is eminently possible. Here’s how a person would enter the info, continuing from the above example:

image_info_map: { 3: { “image”: 3, “url”: “Whatever.png”, “width”: 512, “height”: 512 }, 4: { “image”: 4, “url”: “Some Stuff.png”, “width”: 512, “height”: 512 } }, // image data is here, not in blorb

…and that’ll do it. Note that the images are indexed beginning with the number 3 (because 1 and 2 are already used for the cover/small cover), and they need to be indexed in the same order as they are declared in the source. Width and height also need to match whatever the image is. Then just save play.html with your edits. Also recommended: copying the edited section into another file for safekeeping in case you overwrite play.html in a new release.

As for this, which I think is probably a completely separate issue from the one pinkunz is having, I haven’t a clue why it’s doing that. It should be displaying the small cover in that area, not the regular cover at all. Afraid I have no ideas except the pyrrhic workaround of just resizing the cover image to match the small cover.

Edit for clarity: the image processing step I discussed in the first part of this post is relevant in situations where images are being inserted throughout the game; it has nothing to do with cover art, which SHOULD work without that step.

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