Jolt Country

The biggest feature that Hugo lacks compared to other systems is probably an Internet/browser interpreter. Another problem is Hugo's lack of direct support for Blorb.

Before the Open House, I asked about how to do IFIDs for Hugo on Intfiction. I didn't put an IFID with my submission, but when I fixed the typos and added the menu to upload to the Archive, I added an IFID generated by the TADS website. A couple days after that, a got replies to my question on Intfiction, and now I'm totally confused.

None of the current Hugo interpreters can open Blorb files, correct? This means that I'm not allowed to simply use a normal IFID? I notice that many Hugo games made after the Treaty of Babel still have "legacy" style IFIDs, beginning with "HUGO-" (Tales of the Travelling Swordsman and Robb Sherwin's games).

So, presumambly we still have to extract something from our compiled game files in order to have an IFID? It's all above my head. ;)

Can Hugo adapt when the other IF systems seem to be converging through this Blorb thing and web browser interpreters?

Yeah, I don't entirely understand it, either, and it's a big mess. As of now, I'm using the TADS-site IFID generator. I do this because:

- I mean, even TADS doesn't support blorb (and probably never will). I think Kent said something to me to the effect that supporting blorb would break all of Hugo's multimedia support (this conversation was a long time ago so he might have said something else. I just remember it not being hopeful). I mean, now ADRIFT has jumped on the blorb wagon, and now if I have ADRIFT installed on my computer, it fights over my blorb files. Yeah, we need more of that...
- As someone who always wants to sneak updates into old stupid games I have written, I already kind of hate the serial number system that tips off the player as to when the game was compiled last. The "legacy" IFID system just pisses me off in that respect again.

Anyhow, I know the guy who created the Babel system. I don't think he's given IF much of a thought since doing it six years ago. I don't believe we are going to see any updates to the standard that'd result in not-Inform systems like TADS and Hugo to really jump on board, and we have a bunch of people just pretending otherwise.

I still don't get why every release of my game should need a new IFID. I think that guy was only saying so since Inform games automatically have a new IFID each compile, so again, it's a case of "make everybody else like Inform."

Still, IFIDs make guys like David Welbourn (biggest contibutor to http://www.ifwiki.org) happy, so even though it's kind of useless, I'll add it for them.

First off, I said some inaccurate things in that last post there, now that I've researched the issue. Anyhow, I made a HbE page both about that and ifiction files:

http://hugo.gerynarsabode.org/index.php?title=IFID
http://hugo.gerynarsabode.org/index.php?title=IFiction

Let me know if anyone has any questions yet.