<sorry - wasn’t sure where to post this>
I’ve spent a couple of hours on Google with no luck, so here goes:
If the response to a player’s turn is only a line or two of text, it’s fine. But any more than that, and I have to track my eye up the screen to find where I need to start reading from - because the new text appeared instantaneously.
Is there any way I can slow things down? Back in the day, lines (or even individual words) appeared one at a time, making it far harder to lose one’s place.
Workarounds tried:
Putting delays in the code - hit-and-miss results; I can affect my own stuff, but from what I can make out, there’s plenty of Inform magic going on beyond my reach.
Displaying a wide row of characters to delineate turns - a bit heavy handed, and not completely effective with large chunks of text.
Clearing the screen each turn - so far, the most helpful approach, though the player’s ability to glance up at preceding stuff is lost.
Ideally I’d be tweaking some setting to make the whole game just…run…slower. It doesn’t need to be literal reading speed (that’s so variable that one person’s speed would grate with everyone else) or teletype style (though I’d settle for that) but just slow enough to impart to the player a sense of “Aha! That text is moving up.”
And yeah…though it’s not my primary driver, I’d love to experience the retro stuttering screen output.
Is there a third-party program (for playing released games) that either has such a facility or is “bad” enough to run unintentionaly slow?
Searching for this topic just got me trampled in the headlong rush to the sunny slopes of Mt Zippy. So I get that I’m in a minority - possibly of one - but for me, Yay for an editor that doesn’t lag, Hooray for lightning compile speed, and boffo for blue lights on fire engines. But Boo to a UI that makes UX a chore.
Anyway, back to my Horlicks