Z-machine release, Glulx debug: risks?

Authoring Inform 7
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I’m currently writing a game that’s approaching the Z-machine limit in debug mode (x80000) . However, in release mode, it’s under x70000. I’m able to build from the command line in release mode easily enough to send a build to my testers. But I’ll also be doing a lot of testing with Zarf’s python scripts.

Now I can do some cheating where I comment out some tables (there’s a lot of parser abuse that is not critical to the main story) and re-build and be well under the x80000 limit–I’d just need to test certain commands other ways. But that’s obviously fiddly.

As I’m doing a lot of testing on my own, I’m wondering if there are any errors/“heisenbugs” that might pop up. If there’s anything in particular to be aware of, I don’t mind doing so if it isn’t too much.

The reason I want to release in Z-machine is that the parser abuse I have in mind may slow Glulx down a bit, especially when I hit the parser error rules.

I think I asked a similar question to this years ago on the forum, but I can’t seem to find it. So apologies if this is a duplicate. Thanks!

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If you are using Inform 6, you can use -~S to turn off strict error-checking. This makes the game a bit smaller. Not sure if it’s possible in Inform 7.

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This seems to me to be unlikely to actually be problematic… do you have any actual examples of how Glulx would perform significantly worse?

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Hmm, my current WIP has this problem, but I can’t really release it, because it’s for IFComp, and I haven’t fully been able to isolate the case.

I think that hammering the parser errors with a lot of regular expressions in a table can show a significant slowdown.

But it’s not critical. I’ve been able to find a way to eliminate/cut down certain tables only for my debug build, so that works well enough.

5

I’m probably missing something, but you can have someone look at your game privately for testing purposes - via PM or private email. Just so long as you don’t release the game publicly beforehand.

You know this, you’ve been doing it longer than me! :stuck_out_tongue:

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If you’re willing to try something very experimental (which will probably cause errors), I’m working on this extension to make text and regular expressions substantially faster in Glulx:

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Oh, now that’s an excellent extension…I’ve always wondered why Inform kept managing its own heap when Glulx had dynamic memory support.

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Z-Machine compatibility. But this is something that would make much more sense to be rewritten to be Glulx only. This was a very straightforward extension until I got to the resizing functions (and I expect that’s where the remaining bugs are) because the template code expects blocks to be resizeable in place, but Glulx doesn’t allow for that. Instead a new larger block needs to be allocated, and then the references to the old one replaced.

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Very cool.

I tried to use this with Counterfeit Monkey, but got this on the second turn:

Do you remember our name?

*** BlkValueRead: reading from index out of range: 0 in 5206411 ***
> andra
*** BlkValueRead: reading from index out of range: 1 in 5206363 ***

*** fatal error: Out-of-bounds memory access ***
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Yeah I was originally working on this for CM. I’ve seen those errors, haven’t diagnosed them yet. Was hoping it might work for a simpler game, but haven’t really tested it enough yet.

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