Hugo compiler wish list

[Roody_Yogurt]

So, over the weekend, I perused the intfiction.org forums for the first time in years, catching up on new and old news. I caught this thread, where a maintainer of the Babel tools was trying to detect the IFID from Hugo games that declare one. I think he got it working? I'm not entirely sure.

But it got me thinking about how it'd be nice if the Hugo compiler generated an UUID-style IFID string constant for the game if the source doesn't already declare one, and since people who read this board (and if not here, people we know) are basically the maintainers of the Hugo compiler now, maybe we should discuss this and any other possible compiler improvements we can think of. Of course, if any idea got that far, I'd still want to ask Kent for his blessing before we implement it, but I figured a post here would be a good place to start.

Does anybody have anything they'd want to see? (*)

Would the IFID idea be worth the trouble of getting someone to implement it?

* - Of course, I'm not looking for big feature updates to the compiler that would require updated interpreters- just things that would work with the existing file format.

[RealNC]

How do you even add an IFID to a Hugo game?

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I think I just made one up?

[Roody_Yogurt]

In the past, I have used the IFID Generator site:
http://www.tads.org/ifidgen/ifidgen

And then I add it to the game source as an IFID string constant.

[Tdarcos]

UUIDs - also called GUIDs - were all but {00000000-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}* at the time Hugo was created. They are only needed when the game is either finalized or ready for posting to the IFID. It's such a bespoke and irrelevant task to the game's development, that I think it's not important
enough to justify the time used to develop a generator. As noted, there is already an online generator, and Microsoft includes the guidgen program for C compilers. It's a lot of work for very little return. Upgrade work should be the things that are important for game developers and that they would use regularly, either when writing and playtesting or when released.

- - - -
* This is the UUID for "iUnknown".

[RealNC]

That's not the...

Never mind.

[Roody_Yogurt]

So, over the weekend, I perused the intfiction.org forums for the first time in years, catching up on new and old news. I caught this thread, where a maintainer of the Babel tools was trying to detect the IFID from Hugo games that declare one. I think he got it working? I'm not entirely sure.

Just updating this thread to say that it looks like they got the scraper working.

Code: Select all

/* We look for the pattern XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX (8-4-4-4-12)
 * where X is a number or A-F.
 * One Hugo game, PAXLess, uses lowercase letters. The rest all use uppercase.
 */

So we can do what we've always done, which is just define an IFID constant and hope that someone cares. And now we know that some tools will care! (by tools, I mean the babel tool and IF frontends. Not people.)