Hugor testing

RealNC · Post by **RealNC** » Wed Mar 28, 2012 10:50 pm

(I've also posted this over at int-fiction.org, but I suspect Hugo fans hang around here more often.)

I've introduced a full screen mode to the Hugor interpreter. The maximum width of the game window when in full screen can be set in the preferences (this is useful for avoiding ridiculously long text lines with widescreen monitors.) The effect when playing graphical games in full screen is nicer than I expected :-)

Full screen is supposed to work on all systems. Would be nice if people would give this a spin and report any glitches or weird behavior they come across. Downloads for all operating systems can be found at:

http://foss.aegean.gr/~realnc/hugor/testing/

Roody_Yogurt · Post by **Roody_Yogurt** » Thu Mar 29, 2012 2:12 am

Just some days ago, I was discussing this with Marc Simpson, and we were agreeing that playing most games fullscreen was "too much" on a widescreen display. I figure that conversation may or may not have made its way to you, but whatever the case, yeah, this is a good idea (and it works fine for me on Windows).

The other way to handle it that I envisioned was to split the application into two (connected) windows, ideally with a moveable partition. One side would be for the normal interpreter; the other side could be used for various cool-interpreter things.

Like, while playing Andrew Plotkin's recent MakerBot game, I was getting annoyed with having to copy text over to a text window to keep track of things. It got me thinking that it'd be cool if some interpreters had an optional docked sidebar text pad to write notes on, and in Hugor's case, it'd be a good way to utilize that extra space.

Also feasible would be to use some of that space for a docked version of the Hugo interpreter compass. Honestly, the compass is not a very important feature (as it doesn't change depending on what exits are available or anything), but still, one of the main reasons I don't use it is I don't like how it floats.

It was only recently that I even realized that the non-overlayed scrollback can coexist with the game window while you're playing the game. That's a pretty neat feature. The scrollback could also maybe be a viewable thing in the sidebar area, with maybe tabs to switch between the options.

Anyhow, I don't know if these things are even possible, and it's likely that it doesn't sound worth the effort... but anyhow, food for thought.

Whether or not anything is done in that regard, another thing I like about Hugor is that its potential to be a sandbox for testing out experimental interpreter features.

RealNC · Post by **RealNC** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 3:33 am

Not sure about the scrollback, but a compass rose, possibly accompanied by an auto-mapper would spice things up. People are using Trizbort for this; maybe we can put that built-in into the interpreter (especially since Trizbort is Windows-only.)

There's also some other ideas I had. For example a way for games to tweak the settings of the interpreter by shipping with a "hugor.ini" file. Examples of what might be set in there include launching the game directly in fullscreen mode and perhaps using bundled fonts. (Although that latter part is a bit dangerous as the fonts that the author ships with the game might look ugly on other operating systems.) Or any other settings and customizations that would help in shipping games that look more stand-alone-like.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 7:40 am

I've available to test tonight, Nikos.

Roody_Yogurt · Post by **Roody_Yogurt** » Fri Mar 30, 2012 12:05 pm

RealNC wrote:Not sure about the scrollback, but a compass rose, possibly accompanied by an auto-mapper would spice things up. People are using Trizbort for this; maybe we can put that built-in into the interpreter (especially since Trizbort is Windows-only.)

Funny. When I was thinking of possible features to add, I thought specifically of Zinc and its mapping feature but didn't want to suggest anything too complicated (even if Zinc's mapper is not an automapper and is kind of simple, as far as mapping programs go).

As far as my note-taking idea goes, I was thinking maybe it is more feasible to do the kind of interface from "to do" apps, where you click on a field to be able to fill it with text. Maybe that'd be easier to do than emulating a little notepad there.

I really know nothing about interface design.

RealNC wrote:There's also some other ideas I had. For example a way for games to tweak the settings of the interpreter by shipping with a "hugor.ini" file. Examples of what might be set in there include launching the game directly in fullscreen mode and perhaps using bundled fonts. (Although that latter part is a bit dangerous as the fonts that the author ships with the game might look ugly on other operating systems.) Or any other settings and customizations that would help in shipping games that look more stand-alone-like.

The fullscreen thing definitely would be most useful for games like Cryptozookeeper that are giving a full, commercial game experience, and I know Recchi has wondered about the feasibility of bundled fonts before.

All in all, these are interesting suggestions. I think Inform's potential has been hurt over the years by stripping authors of the right to make certain stylistic decisions (although I probably could not back this up with a particularly well-articulated argument). It'd be interesting to push this angle a bit for Hugo while we can, if only to show the world that such things don't make the universe implode.

Roody_Yogurt · Post by **Roody_Yogurt** » Fri Apr 13, 2012 11:13 pm

I have lately been reminded of a discussion I had with Nikos early on. The offiicial interpreter has some inconsistent handling of meta commands. While SAVE, RESTORE, and UNDO are just handled by sending the appropriate text to the game, RESTART completely ignores the in-game functionality and just starts up a new instance of the game (I believe). In any case, it sidesteps whatever an author has coded for the case of a restart, such as the letting-the-game-know-that-a-transcript-is-running code in the beta.h library extension.

Hugor avoids this by not having options for these meta commands at all, which is better in some ways. Still, I feel some sympathy for people new to IF who may open up a Hugo game for the first time with Hugor. It's not the interpreter's responsibility to show players how to play IF, but I do think it'd be nice to have something to handle these meta commands.

The two ways of handling it I see are:

1. Add those commands to the file menu, except have all of them redirect text to the game.
- PRO: Does the official interpreter thing, but better.
  CON: Won't work if the player is not in a regular prompt, won't work with "abuses" or other games that don't use the regular library.
2. Have a little help page under Help in the menu bar that lists common meta commands.
- PRO: Don't have to add somewhat ineffective menu bar commands.
  CON: We'd have to write a help page, and writing things sucks.

Roody_Yogurt · Post by **Roody_Yogurt** » Sat May 26, 2012 1:56 pm

I'm working on a game that plays some music right away. In Hugor in Windows 7, it doesn't always play. Then I'll click on my volume bar or something just to make sure my volume is high enough, and when I click back, sound works ok.

I'm guessing that in some cases, it is having trouble detecting that its the forefront window (and clicking on the window while it's already in the forefront doesn't work), which is why you have to switch to something else and switch back.

Anyhow, I don't know how easy that'll be to track down, but I reckon that's something to fix.

RealNC · Post by **RealNC** » Thu Jun 14, 2012 9:14 am

Oopsy, sorry for the delay in getting back. I missed this post. (Been very busy the last month and don't check the forums regularly.)

Can you send me a copy of the game that shows the problem? (I suspect it's the auto-mute functionality when the window is losing focus; it somehow gets confused for some reason.)

Roody_Yogurt · Post by **Roody_Yogurt** » Mon Sep 24, 2012 3:41 pm

(The stuff in the previous post was taken care of in Hugor 1.0)

Hey, I have a feature request! I'd like there to be a mode where MORE prompts are ignored completely, so the game continues to scroll. This would mainly be useful to authors who are playing back recordings or transcribing the output of very-long debugging routines. As such, I imagine it'd be another good setting for the "hugor.ini" file suggested earlier in this thread.

This got me thinking about how the external settings file might be a good place for other experimental settings, too (like the option to allow PG-DN-to-leave-scrollback. I understand where you're coming from on that one, but I still feel PG-DN just feels nice).

Tdarcos · Post by **Tdarcos** » Mon Sep 24, 2012 6:12 pm

RealNC wrote:Full screen is supposed to work on all systems. Would be nice if people would give this a spin and report any glitches or weird behavior they come across.

For my game Tripkey, font choices have no effect. Windows 7, 64-bit, 4 GB memory. Can't get anything but a fixed-width font and the option doesn't change it.

Code: Select all

room Meter_Room "You are in the Meter Room of the control center"
&#123;
	is stuffy,smokesafe
	
	after
	&#123;
		location MovePlayer
		&#123;
        if start_gas_meter is leaking 		! Hissss.....
           sound repeat "air leak.wav"
		&#125;
	&#125;   

	long_desc
	&#123;
		print "Nailed to a table is a yardstick. Oh. Excuse me, 
		it's 39 inches long. It's a ";
		font&#40;ITALIC_ON&#41;
		print "meter ";
		font&#40;ITALIC_OFF&#41;
		print "stick.  Of course, how stupid of me!"
		print "You can go OUT or WEST to return to the control center."
	&#125;
	OUT_to Control_Center		
	W_to Control_Center
&#125;

In the Tessman runtime, it appears as:

Nailed to a table is a yardstick. Oh. Excuse me, it's 39 inches long. It's a meter stick. Of course, how stupid of me!

In the hugor program no font change occurs.

Tdarcos · Post by **Tdarcos** » Mon Sep 24, 2012 6:33 pm

Sorry, I had downloaded version 0.8. Hugor version 1.0 does correctly do the italic but it still seems to stay in fixed font.

Roody_Yogurt · Post by **Roody_Yogurt** » Mon Sep 24, 2012 6:36 pm

Make sure your game sets the DEFAULT_FONT global as PROP_ON in your init routine:

Code: Select all

DEFAULT_FONT = PROP_ON

RealNC · Post by **RealNC** » Mon Sep 24, 2012 10:02 pm

Roody_Yogurt wrote:Hey, I have a feature request! I'd like there to be a mode where MORE prompts are ignored completely, so the game continues to scroll. This would mainly be useful to authors who are playing back recordings or transcribing the output of very-long debugging routines. As such, I imagine it'd be another good setting for the "hugor.ini" file suggested earlier in this thread.

This got me thinking about how the external settings file might be a good place for other experimental settings, too (like the option to allow PG-DN-to-leave-scrollback. I understand where you're coming from on that one, but I still feel PG-DN just feels nice).

Sounds good to me. For the time being, you can bypass MORE prompts after doing PLAYBACK by pressing "+" in the first prompt. This will bypass any follow-up prompts.

Roody_Yogurt · Post by **Roody_Yogurt** » Mon Sep 24, 2012 10:23 pm

Whoa, that is great to know, thanks.

Roody_Yogurt · Post by **Roody_Yogurt** » Mon Sep 24, 2012 10:35 pm

Ah, I see it only works during playback, but that's still good to know.

RealNC · Post by **RealNC** » Tue Sep 25, 2012 11:19 am

Btw, that's an (undocumented) feature of the core engine, so this also works with hewin.exe.

RealNC · Post by **RealNC** » Tue Sep 25, 2012 11:23 am

Tdarcos wrote:Sorry, I had downloaded version 0.8. Hugor version 1.0 does correctly do the italic but it still seems to stay in fixed font.

The default is always a fixed width font. Also in the official interpreter, I believe. Do you only get a fixed width font with Hugor? If yes, then I'm probably doing something wrong with font handling.

Tdarcos · Post by **Tdarcos** » Tue Sep 25, 2012 11:33 am

RealNC wrote:
Tdarcos wrote:Sorry, I had downloaded version 0.8. Hugor version 1.0 does correctly do the italic but it still seems to stay in fixed font.
The default is always a fixed width font. Also in the official interpreter, I believe. Do you only get a fixed width font with Hugor? If yes, then I'm probably doing something wrong with font handling.

I discovered after I put the recommended item in that I was getting a fixed-width font in the Tessman interpreter, and for what I'm doing I discovered that proportional looks terrible here. The only thing that was different was that 0.8 didn't honor italic which I didn't know I was using the old version. From what I see it looks like the HugoR interpreter does more-or-less the same as Tessman's work except that you use a slightly different fixed-width font than he does. And that might even be reselectable in your options menu. I'll check it out.

Tdarcos · Post by **Tdarcos** » Tue Sep 25, 2012 11:35 am

Changing the fixed-width font works in HugoR as soon as the next type-in to or print out from the program occurs.

Tdarcos · Post by **Tdarcos** » Tue Sep 25, 2012 11:37 am

Actually, doing this whole thing has made me realize that I can switch to proportional in my game except when the player is in the cube, which requires fixed-width for the on-screen maps to work. I'll try that.

Hugor testing

Hugor testing

Re: Hugor testing