i would like to put images in my inform6 code, compile this to glulx, and then wrap everything in a gblorb.
this doesn’t currently seem doable.
right off the bat, i can’t write inform code using the image resources because i need to include a .bli file telling the compiler of the existence of those image resources?
the only tool i can find that generates a .bli file are the old windows32 iblorb utilities. i can run these on windows XP in virtualbox but the resulting .bli files (shockingly!) don’t work when brought back over to my .inf source code.
I believe a .bli file is just Inform source text defining constants for all the resource IDs (Constant Picture_Cover 1; and the like). Most blorb tools should produce something of the sort; which set of tools are you using?
yeah, that’s what i thought but looking at the file size i think there’s more to it than just resource IDs. plus i stripped out everything except the resource IDs and it still doesn’t work.
what set of tools? that’s the problem. there don’t appear to be usable tools. i built the .bli unsuccessfully using the old MSDOS utilities. i’ve tried gblorb but it doesn’t work either. i’ve played with 20-year old perl scripts without luck.
it appears to be quite easy to create a blorb from inform 7+. i’ve played around with inblorb (the command line tool) but don’t have the skill to get it to work for inform 6 which should be possible.
The usual format, at least in the past, was the .blurb format, as documented in the Inform 6 DM4. I’m not sure which tools support .blurbs, but some of the old ones should still work.
no. i tried several interpreters on mac but gblorb would never ‘find’ the resources.
i tried a couple interpreters on windows as well. on one of them gblorb was finally able to find the resources but kept giving me errors telling me the jpg or png or whatever was invalid. i gave up.
and in reply to dannii re: old blurb tools → yes i’ve tried perlBlorb and can make a blorb with it. but i’m still left with my original problem: i can’t get the resources into my inform source code in the first place to do anything with them prior to compiling into a blorb.
i’m giving up. it looks like if i want to build anything with multimedia, i6/glulx is out (the tools are woefully out of date, largely undocumented, and beyond my skill level) and i will need to bite the bullet and make the move to inform 7 or TADS.
You don’t have to put the resources into Inform 6. You just have to use the same picture or sound resource ID numbers that you use when creating the blorb afterwards.
The fundamental problem is that the tools, documentation and support are hopelessly inadequate. I worked it out a few years ago, but it took me a month or so to do it.
I spent some time today reverse engineering one of my (unpublished) games that uses graphics and sound and wrote up a Word document with the basic steps and lots of detailed code. I’ve sent this to @improvmonster. If he can get it to work, then I might expand and spiffy up the document and make it more widely available somewhere. No promises, though.
And it made clear what a .bli is! It’s a file generated by iblorb that consists of I6 code to refer to the Blorb resources. I guess it’s used so that you don’t have to think about individual resource numbers? But that’s easy enough to do yourself if you’re using another tool instead.
gblorb is interesting, and has the advantage of running in the Glulx interpreter that you’ll already have if you’re making a Glulx game. But I’m not sure how it gets around the file extension limitations of Glk - I suspect it only works in some Glulx interpreters.
It is unfortunate the current state of Blorb tools is so confusing. At the moment I think I’d just recommend blorbtool.py. It’s cross platform (just needs Python to be installed), and can either be run from a bash/batch script, or in interactive mode. You’ll have to think about resource numbers, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
If someone was looking for a weekend project, it looks like basically none of the Blorb tools are on the IF Wiki. Bringing it up to date would probably be very helpful.
Have you read the Blorb specification to see how blorbtool.py is supposed to work? Have you loaded a working zblorb file to look at its contents as an example?
so, literally on the 50th and last try before throwing in the towel, i finally found the magic combination of interpreter/machine/day of the week/outside humidity and got gblorb to work.
granted, it didn’t like one of my picture resources and seems very futzy. but i did get a functioning playable proof-of-concept blorb file. with one image… but i guess it’s a start.
thanks to everyone for the input. this must be what it feels like to help a monkey clean a carburetor by phone.
Sorry I’m late. Have you tried using pblorb.pl which is found in the inform6unix package? Since it seems that you use a Macintosh, that should be easily available to you through Brew.