intfiction.org

Further investigation determines that if I delete the damn app and reinstall it, on iOS3/4 devices, the bug appears!

(I had tested wiping the *startup state* -- the file that loads when you first start the app -- but not the entire app. Which should make no difference at all! But, right, bugs. They mock us.)

Now I have something to test, anyhow. I will return to this -- er, sometime this week. After WWDC.

(I am not *at* WWDC -- not on my budget -- but I'm keeping an eye on some things that may arise. Which may be cool.)

I've found the bug. It will be fixed in the next Dreamhold release. (That won't be for a few weeks, though.) Thanks for the reports.

This is another memory-overflow bug, so it could potentially appear on any device. However, as I said, it's only been seen on iOS3 and iOS4.

Huzzah! If only all bugs encountered in all games could be used as fodder for Darwinian evolution. Keep up the good work!

Any idea when the glulx version will be available? I was going to use it for Shadow in the Cathedral and Secret Letter.

David C.
www.textfyre.com

Hm. I wasn't going to focus on it right away.

If I said it would be another four to six weeks, would that put a hurt on a schedule on your end? Or are you just waiting for something to become available?

The "K" version of Shadow is going to be out in a week or two. The Android version will be out in a few weeks. I think getting the iPad version out in August is fine. I certainly don't want you to rush on my account. I was just looking to poke you on it and see when it would be ready.

Secret Letter is lagging, but will follow this summer as well.

David C.
www.textfyre.com

I'd better make clear right now -- I haven't implemented *any* of the graphics display features of glk yet. They shouldn't be too hard, but it will be a feature-add and I assume you want that stuff.

I show sketches at the beginning of each chapter as well as the Textfyre logo and cover image on start up. So yes, I'd want the graphics stuff.

David C.
www.textfyre.com

Great game - great platform! Thank you so much.

This isn't a bug so hope this is the right place to post... I really liked the pop up window for tapping commands. I think that this is particularly useful for the iphone/touch. On the ipad, I think that the box could be proportionally a bit bigger to the screen but it works well there too. Anyway, I had a suggestion for organizing this slightly differently. At the moment, it has common commands / prepositions / directions all in one box and two tabs: common commands / recent commands...

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-drea ... 70810?mt=8

What about if this box just had VERBS? You could fit around 30 verbs in the box which is really quite extensive (the tabs could be MORE VERBS / NEXT WORD)... I couldn't think of many times that I would use recent ones except from a RESTORE position in fairly cruel game!

Here's the thing: the second box would be all the NOUNS in scope with the same tabs underneath.
(I'm assuming that this would be possible to tie into the Inform code: it could even be for all the nouns which don't fire a default library message so keeping the player immersed and cutting down the number of obscure commands...)

The third box would be all the PREPOSITIONS in the game.

And of course the fourth box would be for the SECOND NOUN.

This would take advantage of the standardized grammar of IF which I'm fairly sure is always VERB or VERB + NOUN or VERB + NOUN + PREP + 2nd NOUN.

On the downside, it might mean two-touch movement... GO + NORTH. On the very plus side, it would mean that the whole game could potentially be played from the pop up box(es). While veteran IF players will probably always prefer keyboard (however small), I can see tap-play being very appealing for younger / newer players especially on public transport etc.

Would this work?

The input interface has no access to scope or game state, is one problem. Tying into Inform code like that is not practical. (The map inspects the current location, which is a variable, but determining scope requires executing code.)

At a deeper level -- I consciously chose *not* to supply all game verbs and nouns in the pop-up interface. I wanted to make it clear that the menus are not the game, and you can't decide what to do next by inspecting the menu interface. Obviously I need to balance that against convenience, but I really think that the gameplay would suffer from making the menus more noteworthy than the text -- and this would not be justified by the decrease in typing effort.

I am considering a proposal to make the double-tap feature work with the menus, such that double-tapping a noun on screen opens a verb menu. That would streamline the most common case (verb, on-screen noun). But it would still be a list of common verbs, rather than a contextual list. And distinguishing game nouns from non-nouns is tricky to begin with.