Viewing parser transcripts on mobile (and in Frotz)?

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Sorry if a similar question has been asked. I used the search feature, but there’s so many scattered posts about transcripting and I couldn’t find a definitive one that answered my question. On my phone, I tried to play an Inform parser game on Itch.io (Warden, for anyone curious) and entered “transcript” in the Itch embedded window to start recording a transcript. Then I realized I didn’t know how to view the transcript. Entering “transcript” again just says I’ve already created a transcript. The existing posts about this seem to imply I’d have to fiddle around in the browser console or mess with local storage to view the transcript, which isn’t very doable on a phone.

I downloaded Frotz on my phone and tried downloading the game from Itch and playing the downloaded game file on Frotz, then realized I also don’t know how to view game transcripts in Frotz or where it saves them.

There might be an easy answer to this that I’m missing as I’m not familiar with the transcript commands you’re supposed to execute in parser games for recording playthroughs.

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If you type “restore”, there’s a dialog box. You should be able to select “all files”, see the transcript file, and then hit “download”.

(This is a Parchment layer, and in fact the first time I’ve run into it, so I can’t usefully answer questions about it. Games exported using the Quixe interpreter have a different dialog box implementation – hit the “Edit” button in those.)

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Thanks, that works for Itch.io! It took me a bit to find the option to change “File type” to All Files, but it’s there. I ended up switching to Frotz though, and the advice doesn’t work there as I can’t see a “File type” option and using “restore” just shows me my saves.

Edit: It’s a fun game, though.

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> examine springtails
A pale, pudgy little bug, tiny enough that you could hold several of them even in your smaller hands. They go everywhere, but you wouldn’t want to keep them out even if you could. They eat fungus and algae that could weaken the stump.

> pet springtails
You reach for one, but it scuttles quickly away and up into the narrow skylight.

> nooooo
That isn’t a valid command.

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As for you other question re: Frotz, if you have an iPhone you probably have to use the file transfer service to access transcripts in Frotz for iOS.

(The Dropbox feature probably works, too, but I’ve never tried it.)

The files aren’t in the iOS “files” app, so I’m not sure where else to look.

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Mobile Frotz is an entirely different situation and I don’t remember where the files go.

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Thanks, I thought it might be something like that. I’ll try it when I get home.

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Timely question, with recent threads about mobile browser keyboards and the general hassle of playing on mobile. (If I think too hard about the phrase “You can save them using a Web Browser or FTP client and load them on a computer using Zoom” I’m going to become the Joker.)

This isn’t helpful, just another way to say that playing parsers on mobile can be rough, but when I first read this, I tried using Frotz and browser just to see what I could see. Keyboard issues were a problem on itch (no surprise there), and I had trouble figuring out how to actually access or open a download of the game from within Frotz. (Tried doing it from within the app, and a large ad-like overlay covered much of the lower screen and screen and told me to click to access my content, which… Idk if that’s normal, but I will not be doing all of that, thanks.)

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Is this for iOS? There is some weird behavior at itch, for sure. If I navigate to itch directly via Safari, the download works fine (but isn’t visible in Frotz). Itch has taken off in the past few years; I don’t think anyone would have looked anywhere else for parser games in the past. But that’s in the past. It would be good if Frotz for iOS could browse local files. It’s easier for users to access files than it once was.

Adding it from the Spring Thing website works as expected.

Frotz for iOS has a good play interface, once you get through all of that, but the friction does feel consistent with other mobile experiences.

I’ll have to add this to my list of things to think about. My games are archived at IF Archive but their primary means of access is via itch, which means Frotz for iOS users have not been able to access the GBLORBs directly (leaving the playable website as an option, but that’s a moving target).

I think realistically most players are on larger devices, but offering mobile users a good experience across a large variety of devices is desirable. I think it’s generally possible to tell a user with a specific device what will be best, but arriving at a short, single-sentence advisory in a game description is something I haven’t figured out.

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Yeah, I couldn’t figure out how to do the download from Itch inside the Frotz app either, and I don’t think the IFDB page links to the Spring Thing download. [Edit: D’oh, this is obviously because Warden is not a Spring Thing game and doesn’t have a Spring Thing page. I was thinking of IFArchive and/or confusing it with the sequel, Strings.] I had better luck just downloading the .gblorb game file from the Itch.io page in Safari, and then tapping the .gblorb in the Downloads menu in Safari opens it in Frotz automatically, I guess because having Frotz installed sets it as the default app for opening .gblorb files. It’s not intuitive, though.

I’ve finished the game now, with three different endings discovered. I liked it! I’ll see if I can get my Frotz transcript downloaded later.

I did notice that Frotz doesn’t let you copy text from the parser game you’re playing, which is annoying to say the least.

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I’ve found that the decentralization of games, while probably better long-term, does get confusing. Just thinking about comps I’ve participated in, Ectocomp runs through Itch, Spring Thing links to and/or hosts games based on what the author provides, and my understanding is that IF Comp hosts games while allowing publication to other platforms once the comp is live. I’m all for early web-style decentralization, but it does make accounting for the various ways people may try to access them more difficult.

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We should be clear that this is not due to a centralized decision that IF games should be decentralized!

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I would prefer having everything in one place, but without itch.io’s analytics I wouldn’t know that people actually look at my games. That’s the big draw for me.

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I get headaches dealing with itch.io’s iframes. If I use the Archive and its unboxing service, it doesn’t lock the game into landscape orientation on mobile, which is a big plus! (Itch isn’t supposed to do that any more, but it does.)

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So don’t use it. I didn’t think you ever used it. I know I don’t.

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Annoyingly, even if you “click to launch in fullscreen”, it still puts it in an iframe for security reasons. I get why they do it, but from the perspective of maintaining the Å-machine web terp, the Archive is much easier to deal with!

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Ah, I see. I never noticed, as I’ve had no need to view the source when it opens in the full browser window.

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An update on Frotz transcripting: The file server worked when I started it up, but I appear to have lost my existing transcript. When I looked at the transcript initially, it had been replaced with one that only extends 2 turns into the game. I did run the “transcript” command right before turning on the file server to see if I got the “Transcripting is already on” message (and was surprised when I didn’t and it said it was starting a new transcript), but don’t know if that’s related.

I experimented a bit with what exactly causes a transcript to be lost, and I’m not entirely sure what it is. I notice that the first time you run a “transcript” command in a game in Frotz, it lets you choose the name of the transcript file, but afterwards you can never change this file’s name and it seems to always put your data in the exact same file, so maybe I did override my old transcript by running the transcript command again.

Or maybe it’s because of the save/restore/restart behavior, which seems to interact very oddly with the transcript behavior. If I restore to a save where there was no transcript, then it lets me start a transcript even if I’ve already started a transcript. And if I restart, my transcript “status” doesn’t reset, but restarting can cause weird behavior to show up in the transcript as well (odd behavior, missing commands, etc). It still addends to the end of the existing transcript and doesn’t overwrite it, I think, but the restore and restart commands aren’t properly showing up in the transcript, and then commands seem to get misaligned somehow. Then the transcript contains stuff like:

>���������
Transcripting is already on.

Closing Frotz, or closing the game inside Frotz, doesn’t appear to have anything to do with this issue, as my new test transcript is still there and transferable after I do that. But maybe some combination of using a lot of save/restore/start in my multiple playthroughs of the game, and closing the app a lot, deleted my existing transcript.

I’ve attached my test transcript of Warden in case that would help anyone, though it’s not an actual transcript of the game and mainly demonstrates the odd behavior around save/restore/restart. It does contain spoilers for the game’s story and one ending.

test.txt (13.9 KB)

It’s odd, because I can access all my saves easily via the Frotz file server and all of those are working fine. I guess it’s because Frotz supports multiple saves and a save menu, but you can only have one transcript at a time and there’s no way to view it in Frotz without using the file server.

I don’t know Inform, so I’m not sure if the transcript behavior is built-in like this or if it can be configured. I also haven’t tested transcript behavior elsewhere, so I don’t know if these quirks are Frotz-specific.

For anyone reading this in the future who wants to use Frotz transcripting, it seems like it’d be a good idea to avoid the restore or restart commands without saving your transcript first, as that could be the cause of this strange behavior. Or better yet, just use the browser transcript functionality. I’ll do that next time and see what happens.

I did write a review of Warden to make up for the lack of transcript, for what it’s worth.

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I’m onboard with Itch’s iframes causing weird issues. The inability to resize games according to the user’s device window size is a big one. Stuff like viewport doesn’t work the way it should on Itch because it’s nested and not directly inside the HTML page. /complaint

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