If anyone would like to help beta test a Lovecraft-inspired horror IF game, and are willing to provide feedback privately offline while it’s still a WIP, please get in touch with me at: dwnaef@rive-fantasy.com.
Over the next week or so I’ll be working on polishing the props and game some more, and would appreciate any help. I think I’ve weeded out a lot of bugs and issues through alpha-phase testing, but doubtless there’s more to be found.
It’s a Glulx-sized game and runs best on Gargoyle. Other interpreters don’t seem to support some of the in-game graphics displays I’d like to include in the final version, though I haven’t tried them all yet.
Thanks in advance for any help or interest – Dustin Neff
Good to hear! If you have time, could you post about the graphics incompatibilities you’re seeing? As far as I know, most interpreters should have similar graphics capabilities.
The graphics issue is on Windows Glulx, and it doesn’t involve your automapping or any of your extensions. It happens when I want to display a picture in the text body, after typing a command in. The interpreter displays it and zips it up the screen after [MORE] prompts, and if it scrolls off-screen there’s no way to scroll backwards to look at it. So you get a real quick-shot view of any graphic you want to display.
So if I want the player to be able to type a command and display a more detailed map, or the Play IF reference card below the command line, on Windows Glulx that feature doesn’t integrate well. So that’s why I’ve recommended Gargoyle. I haven’t tested it on all interpreters yet.
The only performance issues I’ve noticed with automapping is the lag when playing on an iPad, where iFrotz doesn’t render the automap without the map window blinking on and off, then redrawing everything on every turn.
I haven’t been able to get iFrotz to display graphics beneath the command line prompt either, only in a defined header or footer window. So I’ve had to disable automapping and text-body graphics to have a version that runs okay on the iPad, but I can still display them in a header window on that device with no problems.
OK, thanks! that’s an inherent limitation in the way scrollback is handled in Windows Glulx and Windows Git. I just wanted to find out if there were bugs in any of the interpreters that had gone unnoticed, or any bugs in my extensions that hadn’t shown up in any of the interpreters I usually test on.
Whoa, I didn’t know that iFrotz’s new Glulx support included graphics–I assumed it was still a text-only interpreter. The first problem you describe could be due to inherent performance limitations on the iPad, or to kinks in iFrotz, it’s hard to guess which. I see some testing in my future…
One simple way to elliminate that graphics problem would be to pause the game, waiting for a keypress, just after displaying the graphic. It could even be toggleable, so only those who are using interpreters in which it becomes an issue need turn it on.
You can also add another window, and display the graphics there.
