Zork Zero support is now on par with the other Infocom graphical games. When VoiceOver is active, all graphical puzzles can be skipped.
New interpreter: Scarier, basically a C++ port of SCARE with improved compatibility and performance, smushed together with a C++ port of FrankenDrift. Plays any Adrift game from version 3.8 and up. Supports the Adrift 3.9 and 4.0 battle systems. Sound, graphics, and maps.
Geas has been updated as well, and can now play most Quest games up to and including version 5 (EDIT: by smushing it together with a C++ port of Quest Viva).
The Comprehend interpreter has been ported from ScummVM and polished a bit. Plays the Apple II and PC versions of Transylvania, Crimson Crown, Oo-Topos, The Coveted Mirror, and Talisman.
Very cool, and it looks like your automated Quest testing has found some regressions in Quest Viva - I’ve added those as issues to the main Quest repo.
At first I thought the announcement in the changelog was a joke. Then I saw how Claude has nearly as many commits as you have, and it seems plausible now.
Hello, hey, I had a quick question. I really don’t know how it all works, I am just curious. For this update:
Magnetic got the same image resizing functionality as Level9.
Do you take the Magnetic interpreter and make the changes yourself and make that part of Splatterlight? I ask only because it does not seem like such a change is on the Magnetic repo itself. But I could be looking in the wrong spot. I love the image resizing feature that Level9 has, so I am just curious.
By the way, Gargoyle has its own image scaling code for Magnetic, which lets the user give exact pixel dimensions. That is probably a better idea. The Spatterlight code simply scales automatically to the largest integer that fits the window, for both interpreters.
The pre-Adrift 5 part of Scarier is based on the SCARE code, but also on decompilation of the Adrift runners, and on lots of tests comparing the output of Scarier to the output of the runners.
I’ve updated this code quite a bit already since the Spatterlight 1.5.2 release, so I’ll try to get a new one out soon.
Please upload what you have to the IF Archive! Original source code is the best resource we have for ensuring that old games continue to work on modern systems.
One constructive criticism to the excellent Scare interpreter: Disable glk abbreviations by default. E.g the game The PK Girl is not fully compatible. At some point choosing an option C is not apparrently possible as typing c gets translated to “close”.
Oh no! The Glk abbreviations are supposed to always be overruled by any game-specific one-letter commands. I thought I tested this with The PK Girl specifically. Would you mind providing steps to reproduce?
EDIT: I tried it just now and it seems to be working.
What is the licensing status of the earlier Adrift runners? Are they not open source? If Scarier is based in part on the decompilation of proprietary code then I don’t think it will be able to be brought into open source projects like Gargoyle or Parchment.
Silly quibble, but if you’re basing it off SCARE, wouldn’t it make more sense to have a name start with T? (SCARE == Secondary Clone …, with the original clone being jAsea.)
There’s a difference between decompiling in order to document a format and incorporating decompiled code directly in another project. I don’t think we need pure clean room projects in IF, but we still should be clear and careful with code provenance.
(To be fair I don’t know the history of Scare or jAsea either.)
