Trying to link my IFDB upload from IF Archive

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I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I’ve uploaded my game to IF archive, and am trying to set IFDB up so it’s playable. I can set the download link, but how do I make it so it will play the index.html file. Here’s what I have :

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But it doesn’t have the ‘play online’ button on the game’s page:

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I’m doing something dumb wrong, I know it.

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You should just be able to link to this page

https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2021/Games/Dr%20Horrors%20House%20of%20Terror/index.html

and choose any of the options.

Edit: I missed the part about the play online button. Not sure about that, but the above will work for now, you can just title it “play online” of course.

If by ‘button’ you mean ‘link’ my answer should do exactly what you want.

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I wish you were doing it wrong! This is one of the uglier parts of IFDB.

IFDB’s “Play On-line” button works by linking to iplayif.com, which, in turn, only works when you have an URL pointing directly to a playable file (a .gblorb file). iplayif.com doesn’t work with ZIP files containing a .gblorb, which is what you have uploaded to IF Archive.

You may note that I, myself, set the download link for “Dr Horror’s House of Terror” back in October; I pointed the link directly to https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2021/Games/Dr%20Horrors%20House%20of%20Terror/Dr%20Horror’s%20House%20of%20Terror.gblorb and that’s why it had a “Play On-line” button.

Annoyingly, IFDB offers a big blue Play On-line button only for games supported by iplayif.com, even if the game is publicly available on a website like itch.io. There’s a bug filed for this: Add "Play Online" button for web games · Issue #191 · iftechfoundation/ifdb-suggestion-tracker · GitHub

So, for example, Off-Season at the Dream Factory, an Adventuron game which is playable online, just offers a link of type HTML whose title is simply “Play Online.” There’s no big blue button for that.

So, your options here are:

  1. Upload just your updated .gblorb file and link to that on IFDB, which will create the “Play On-line” button
  2. Upload your game to itch.io or borogove.io, and link to that. Title your link “Play Online” (or whatever you like). There won’t be a button, but it’ll be clear enough, like Off-Season.
  3. Talk to IF Archive about arranging to uncompress your file and provide the individual files separately, like we do for IFComp entries.

In your case, I think #1 is your best bet. It doesn’t look like you’ve changed the walkthrough, so we can just keep linking to the competition version, so all you have to do is upload the .gblorb uncompressed to IF Archive; then we can link to that.

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I could make Parchment just redirect to a HTML page if that’s what it’s told to play. Do you think that would be helpful? (It probably wouldn’t by itself solve the Play Online issues of IFDB though.)

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Not really… IFDB still has to be updated to show the Play On-line button for games whose HTML have checked the “This is a playable game file” box. But once someone goes to the trouble of updating IFDB to support that, we might as well just link directly to the HTML file ourselves.

I think it would be more useful to find a way to keep the IFComp game player running permanently, and/or integrate the IFComp game player with borogove.io. That way, the games would remain online when the comp ended, authors could continue to push updates there, etc.

I just filed a ticket about that. Allow IFComp games to continue to be playable after the comp · Issue #356 · iftechfoundation/ifcomp · GitHub

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Right! I will just upload the updated gblorb file, then!! Good to know. Thanks to all for responses! Much appreciated.

Ade

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Following up on this, it looks like https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/glulx/Dr_Horrors_House_of_Terror.gblorb is a different file from https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2021/Games/Dr%20Horrors%20House%20of%20Terror/Dr%20Horror's%20House%20of%20Terror.gblorb but the file still says Release 1 after you type I will rid the world of your evil.

Is the file in the glulx directory updated? I think it might be, but I can’t tell just by looking. I think it’s traditional to bump the release number when you do a post-comp release. (The files are slightly different sizes from each other.)

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My bad! I’ll update release number when I get a chance. Thank you for the follow up!

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21 posts were split to a new topic: Online play for Adrift and IFDB

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I think this could stand to be a separate thread, but…

FWIW, there has been progress since my post back in November.

  • There is now a “Play On-line” button for web games
  • IF Archive now has an “unbox” service https://unbox.ifarchive.org/ that’s designed to be able to unzip and serve games from ZIP archives on ifarchive.org. Therefore, we now can include a “Play On-line” button for zipped games, as long as the ZIP appears on ifarchive.org, and as long as we correctly identify the file and the path to the file inside the ZIP.

Back in February, I went through and tried to make sure that top-rated games (sorted by starsort) on IFDB had Play On-line buttons, and when I added support for linking to the ADRIFT WebRunner, I attempted to set up Play On-line buttons for the top-ranked games in this search: https://ifdb.org/search?searchfor=system%3Aadrift

  • To Hell in a Hamper: Originally ADRIFT, ported to Inform 7, now available as a Glulx
  • Skybreak: ADRIFT 5, works great in the WebRunner
  • Marika the Offering: v1.0 seemed to work in the WebRunner (using unbox service). It looks like you’ve listed v1.1 as an “ALAN 2” file, which would not be eligible for online play. If the ZIP found itself on ifarchive.org, I think we could update the link to make v1.1 web playable.
  • Pirate’s Plunder: Again, I think that if the link became available on ifarchive.org, we could use the unbox service to play it in the web runner. (But would it work?)
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