Okay, so… I’m not looking for the WebUI stuff, as far as I know. I’m not interested in setting up an entire server for a client to connect to, using the standard net-TADS system.
You know how if you look up an Inform 7 game on the IFDB, it has a “play online” option, and it runs in the browser?
Yeah, that.
If I upload a t3 game file to the IFDB (which provides this service), are there any coding practices I should be paying attention to? Are there any quirks that work fine on desktop interpreters that break in a browser or on mobile?
Does “play online” for the IFDB actually launch a small TADS WebUI server with a browser-based client? If that’s the case, how does this complicate things? Also, if that’s the case: Oh My Gawd.
As I understand it, WebUI is more for like multiplayer things.
Mostly asking this because I was trying to play an Inform 7 game, and it kept locking up or breaking the parser on mobile (with the online browser version), which surprised me because it’s a very often-played game in the community. I wound up having to download it to my phone and playing it with Fabularium.
Ever since this happened, there’s been a fear in the back of my mind that online or mobile plays might break where desktop interpreters plays wouldn’t. I’d like to make sure everyone gets the same experience. Failing that, I’d like to make sure the differences don’t ruin the game.
Parchment uses the Glk port of TADS that is also used by Gargoyle and Spatterlight. It doesn’t support WebUI games. So if it runs in Gargoyle it will probably run without issue in Parchment. The main restriction is that most text formatting things won’t work. (But we’re slowly working towards improving support for text formatting.)
Which Inform 7 game was breaking for you? That’s also something I want to hear about…
Ahhhh, yeah, I remember having this issue with Gargoyle, so I use QTads for t3 games, and Gargoyle for everything else.
(Which reminds me: I need to test my game on Gargoyle at some point.)
Woohoo!!!
Photopia. At least I think that’s an I7 game…? That game launched before I even knew what IF was. Might even be a different dev system entirely. Apologies if I got that wrong.
There was a discussion about that game a while back, and I went to replay it (to double-check my strong dislike for it. Sometimes I have a bad experience with a game, because I just enter it incorrectly).
I couldn’t get further than one turn into it on a mobile browser, though, so I ran it on a local interpreter and game file. Fabularium had no issues with it.
EDIT: Oh yeah, also…
Huge sigh of relief. WebUI looks like it requires a lot of changes and I was dreading having to support both WebUI and standard terps.
