Total newbie question about Vorple:

Technical Development Interpreters
1

I just discovered the existence of Vorple and am excited by the possibility it seems to offer of adding graphics and sound to an IF work. However, I’ve already come up against the following barriers:
a) I can’t run the Preview of Vorple for Parchment on the vorple-if.com page-- the heading appears but the prompt appears briefly, in a box, then disappears and I can only retreat to the previous page.
b) The Vorpal Workshop (online) gives me a prompt but accepts no input;
c) so, as far as demos go I’m left with the Undum one, which is intriguing indeed but apparently isn’t designed to handle text input.

I’m on a Mac PPC G4 with OSX 5.8. I have Inform 7 and Parchment but I’m a writer not a programmer, and I’m braced to discover that I’m out of my depth with Vorple. But does anybody have any advice on how I might at least get a sample of what Vorple could do for Inform 7 in more expert hands?

2

The Inform version hasn’t been released yet, so the preview is all there is now. You might be using Internet Explorer 8 which didn’t work with an older version of Parchment the preview uses, or there might be some other glitch.

I don’t know what Vorpal Workshop is.

I suggest you check the web site again in about two weeks – there should be a lot more Inform stuff there by then…

3

Sorry, it’s WorkBench not …Shop, but I see now that the link out of the Vorple page is a png, so I guess it’s not surprising that it didn’t work!

I’m using Firefox 3.6, but I’ll try another browser to see if I have better luck with the preview.

Thanks for the advice re Inform; I’ll just sit tight for a couple of weeks.

4

You don’t need Vorple to add graphics and sound to a work of IF; all the major systems have been capable of displaying graphics and playing sounds for years. The distinction is that they mostly do so at a fairly crude, 90s-website level: display an image in a frame, play a sound file, click on a blue underlined hyperlink. And they don’t work on web interpreters yet.

5

I’ve always found a certain irony in this.

6

A bit belated, but Firefox 3.6 is now more than 2.5 years old (the latest version is Firefox 15) and has less than a percent market share. It will definitely not be officially supported.

7

Considering that Mozilla themselves do not support Firefox 3.6 there is little reason for us to do so.

8

Zarf’s game “Key Features” which he wrote for the MakerBot people, has links to virtual feelies. They are, in reality, 3d objects that can be created on virtual printers (ala, makerbot) which makes them feelies as opposed to just images. So there, a game running in Parchment on a web site that has images.

1 Like
9

I didn’t add images there, actually. I set up the interpreter to “linkify” URLs printed by the game. This feature is sufficiently conservative for me to add to an interpreter without a formal spec change. (Many text-displaying apps, such as chat clients and email readers, will linkify URLs.)

Adding inline graphics is another kettle.

10

True, but knowing the feature is there might be sufficient for some games.

11

The feature is available in Glulx but it’s not turned on by default. You need to add a config line to the game’s Javascript.

12

3.6.28 is as high as it goes for Firefox on the PowerPC, but on Safari 5.0.6 I was able to run the very enjoyable Vorple for Parchment preview. These days I’m just thankful that anything for PPC is supported. :wink:

Thanks Juhana and everybody for the constructive suggestions.