Jolt Country

I went to Emily's page to find a copy of her latest game. There is a link there for something called "Gargoyle." It is supposed to run all manner of games - Hugo, the Zcode ones, TADS, etc.

Long story short, Fallacy of Dawn, Necrotic Drift and the work in progress don't render right and Pantomime comes up as black text on a white background, with green text input. I was going for an "effect" putting Pantomime in a grey background, so I'm actually somewhat cross that the thing doesn't query what the author says the colors should be.* I assume good faith here so I am not all that mad or anything, actually. And the font selection looks wonderful.

That being said, please, as of November 2006, I would not recommend Gargoyle for any games I have created. For Fallacy, anyway, you just get Delarion's head graphic and that's it, as opposed to the proper windows. Ouch!

Gargoyle uses a Hugo GLK implementation. I think it's not so much that it's ignoring the color choices -- it just doesn't know about them. Then again, Tor told me that the colors should work right in Spatterlight (for Mac), which is also a GLK implementation. So I don't know.

There is an .ini file in the Gargoyle directory, which contains all the settings. You can copy it into your game's directory, and rename it to (gamename).ini. Gargoyle will look for it first, and use any of its default settings only if they're *not* overridden by your file.

Look for "tales_ts.ini" in the TTS zip file at http://www.sidneymerk.com/zips/tts13.zip -- it shows what you'd have to change (I think) to do a different background, foreground, titlebar, and "bold" text. It took some experimenting, but it was cool that I all I had to do was include this .ini for Gargoyle to show TTS pretty much the way I wanted.

Graphics in Gargoyle are tricky too, because the display.lineheight (or whatever the var is) returns 0 if nothing has been displayed, or however many lines of display there are. Either that, or it's infinite. So when you start laying out windows that rely on knowing the screen height, it doesn't really work.

I usually make adjustments. As Kent pointed out (or Tor himself, via Kent), GLK Hugo doesn't support a system pause of under 1 second, so you can try the pause for 100th of a second, check the system stat to see if it failed, and if so, "assume" you're using a GLK port. You can't use the picture "inline" feature with Gargoyle, because it tries to create an appropriate embedded window for it. You end up having to just show the picture with a single command -- no window -- as far as I can tell.

I haven't checked to see how FutureBoy! looks on Gargoyle. If the graphics work, maybe Kent's already solved this and I just need to dig around more to find the answer.

Tailoring code that is written in a specific interpreter language to work in a general purpose player (one that feels like a weekend project by some random girly)?

Wouldn't it just be easier to write a front-end to call on the specific interpreter in relation to file type, instead of trying to make a program work with the mishmash of languages?

And Jonsey; how many people outside of the IF community have heard of Hugo or any specfic interpreter? (Many people are familiar with Zork, and I never thought of it as "IF" or as a text game until I came here) Doubtful anyone cares/knows of Gargoyle unless you try to make a note of it.

It's more than that. The idea behind Gargoyle is that it's a 1-stop shop for playing most any work of IF (it'll probably support Quest games eventually, as ralphmerridew has come up with Quest-runner code -- possibly using GLK, but I'm not sure). It gives a unified and familiar feel to all games, with a focus on the presentation (font antialiasing, margins, etc). Some people in the IF community *prefer* Gargoyle or Spatterlight.

Anonymous wrote:And Jonsey; how many people outside of the IF community have heard of Hugo or any specfic interpreter?

None. Less than none. There is probably a mentalist who wipes clean the minds of people who accidentally found out about it while searching for other subjects on Usenet.

But this forum is a good place to note it. I did not get a note back from Tor yet (who I think wrote Gargoyle as a whole) but maybe I will try to ping him on raif. Ah, well.

(And I'm really warming up to how P-mime looks on Gargoyle, after all.)

Merk wrote:Some people in the IF community *prefer* Gargoyle or Spatterlight.

That's the thing. I am curious as to how Guilty Bastards comes out. I will have to download it again and check it. Actually, it should still be on my PC now that I think about it.

I do probably need to get an old Mac to do some testing. I really liked those Macs that had the monitor "built in," Vectrex style. I always thought those looked sharp. And the guy who did Transylvania for it was one talented mofo -- I remember the graphics on that thing being positively chilling. I'll have to look up what model number it was and see how difficult it would be to get it hooked up to the workgroup the rest of my PCs are within. It would definitely be something worth investing fifty bucks in.

Mac Emulators
http://www.zophar.net/mac.html

Thanks, zzzywak!

For what it's worth, Future Boy! dies when you try to select a new game in Gargoyle. I never heard back from Tor, so I don't know what to do next. Post to rgif, I guess.