Hello everyone, I’ve been away from the forum for a while, and as I’ve been browsing I wondered how people are playing IF these days. Apparently some people don’t change because when I searched for topics I found my question What do you play IF on?…
As that’s from 2011 maybe a new poll is in order? I’m curious how things have changed. Here are the same questions from the original linked topic:
How do you rate your experience on your devices, and how would you like to see it improved if at all?
What kind of IF are you playing on a particular device? Only CYOA on Kindle? Big Inform games only on desktop?
What is missing from your platform of choice that you’d like to see?
As for me I play mostly everything now on an Android phone and occasionally an Android tablet, with Fabularium or the browser, but any writing or testing is on a Linux laptop in the rocking chair. Wow, I guess I really am getting old…
Windows laptop exclusively. I think playing choice stuff on a tablet/pad would be great, but I have pretty serious ergo problems typing on one for any amount of time. The same is true for phones.
My experience is good. I have a comfortable setup that works for me. I primarily use Lectrote for mid-size to long parser games and Parchment for shorter works. I like being able to keep the Inform IDE open if I get an idea while playing. Playing choice games is fine, too.
I play parser games almost exclusively, and obviously that’s a better experience on my desktop than on my phone, but I’ll suffer through the phone experience if I’m lying in bed and playing something light. It would be really nice to have a keyboard app specialized for IF. It could conserve screen relative to a general-purpose phone keyboard because the only keys regularly needed are alphabetic characters and space, and then numerics and comma, and period can be under a drill-down. More importantly, the autocomplete/autocorrect algorithms can be tuned around parser-game conventions and autocorrect can be made less eager.
It’s possible to customize keyboard in Fabularium as you wish.
As for me, I acquired a BT-keyboard to play on my phone.
This is how I see it: the terp must compile a dictionary of all the words that the game recognizes. In addition to auto-completion, you can even prevent the player from entering words that are not on this dictionary, so that the player does not waste time entering words that the game will not understand anyway.
Wow, that’s a really high Linux market share (35% currently), and I’m part of it.
I figured it would be sort of high, but like 15% at most.
As for the questions. Pretty much anything browser based works fine. If I’m playing parser IF, I typically go for anything I can run in the terminal via frotz or glulxe combined with Cool Retro Terminal. I wouldn’t ask for anything more, really.
I do have a Windows machine that I remote into for Steam games, but I have never needed to do that for IF games.
I play IF (known to me as Text-Adventures) on my self-assembled computer (motherboard, CPU, RAM) with Windows 11 installed (because it’s an inexpensive method to get a home PC).
And also on Amiga OS. Yes, the Amiga has nice, multitasking operating system, which has evolved through the years. I use it on my desktop A1200 with hard disk drive and CD-ROM.
The Amiga has such systems like (with links to Aminet):
EAC (Engine-Nine Adventure Creator) by Matt Briggs - choice based (EAC)
ADMS (Amiga Dungeon Mastering System) by Adam Dawes - parser based (ADMS)
That would be ideal but it requires specific support on the part of the game and the terp. A phone keyboard app won’t know anything about the terp and just has to take cues from general knowledge about IF (e.g. knowing that I almost certainly meant to swipe “drop” and not “drip”) and other commands which have been recently entered. The default Android keyboard is horrible for IF and you could easily do much better without needing terp integration.
Is there a way to make the results more legible? Me and my screen reader can’t find the numbers for the sea of names for who voted for what and the sea of names is so vast I can’t tell which names are in which list.
Also, the poll is weirdly formatted(who uses buttons instead of checkboxes for a multiselection poll?), so I’m not sure I cast my Linux Desktop vote correctly.
Probably should have included an other device vote as well, since I’ve used a Raspberry Pi to play IF away from my desktop.
So far, I’m comfortable using Frotz and Glulxe in the console with espeakup and have found every browser IF experience I’ve had with Firefox and Orca to be clunky at best.
I haven’t even figured out basic things fighting with an Android smartphone and Talkback and want to drop a fish market on the idiots responsible for every smartphone being a $&%#ing slate and being “screw you, Americans” when it comes to smart flip phones, so that anyone has even tried to make IF work on phones sounds like an exercise in masochism to me. Physical keyboard or GTFO.
Of course, a keyboard integrated into an interpreter, such as in Fabularium, will work best. That’s what I meant. There is hope that it will be further developed.
I play parsed and choice works on my linux laptop and on my linux phone (not Android but Ubuntu Touch). And since I create the app to play games for the platform on the phone, the experience is quite good (I can always tweak the UI if I know how to improve it)
Yeah I like Fabularium’s keyboard, combined with tapping words in the text it works well. I wonder if that board could be made standalone? It would be nice to use it with Parchment.
I play IF on my Apple laptop or iPad. Sometimes I play games on my iPad if I’m not working or near my laptop and it’s annoying because everything is designed for desktops. I only play choice games.
I would rate the desktop/laptop experience 10/10. The iPad experience is 7/10. I think IF authors might need to consider that people using a touch screen aren’t using a keyboard to interact with the game.
I play Steam games on my laptop and shorter Itch games on my iPad if I’m bored or something.
I would like people to design more IF for touch interaction.
A nice idea, but not a feasible one—consider how often you’ll want to enter a custom character name, for example, or a comment for the transcript, or a word to write on a featureless white cube, which isn’t in the game dictionary.
Not very often, to be honest Finally, the author can disable this feature if the game involves the use of arbitrary words.
This is not a hypothetical idea. This is how Metaparser works. When the game starts, the interpreter creates its dictionary, if it has not already been created. While typing commands the terp can give hints to the player. You can specify conditions for displaying hints. You can even turn a parser game into a parser-choice hybrid. Autocomplete works in the same way.
I mainly use an iPad now, but prefer to play IF - both choice based and parser - on a laptop. I can take notes, do any mapping etc, also often save my position better. So I didn’t select iOS or Tablet, even though that’s my main device. Just not for IF!
Yes, the Amiga has nice, multitasking operating system, which has evolved through the years. I use it on my desktop A1200 with hard disk drive and CD-ROM.
(I can always tweak the UI if I know how to improve it)