intfiction.org

The crash happened in IE8 running in Windows 7.

I only recently (well, today actually) played "Ecdysis", a 2007 game by Peter Nepstad:

http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=aqtol7ejlzadgnsz

I wasn't aware of the way it presents itself. It's almost identical to Walker & Silhouette, but you don't click on keywords like in W&L, but on words and sentences. Clicking them executes actual meaningful commands. For example:

"Your side of the bed is soaked with sweat."

Clicking on "soaked with sweat" results in an automatic FEEL THE BED. I like this approach. It takes absolutely nothing away from traditional IF. Yet new players don't even have to understand the parser but can still experience it and, most importantly perhaps, learn about it. If they see the kind of commands generated by simple clicking, they soon figure out how to step in themselves from time to time if they feel like it.

In my opinion, it's a very smart way to offer a full-blown parser yet unobtrusive ease of use at the same time.

Ecdysis was a big influence on me, but the issue I found with this style of game is that there seems to be a limited interest in supporting hyperlinks in interpreters (your QTADS is one of the exceptions). When I see a review of Ecdysis, I know it will fall into one of two camps: those who played it with hyperlinks and found it to be a smooth ride - and those who played it without hyperlinks and can't understand why people are enjoying such a sparsely implemented, poorly clued game.

Assuming that you can jump that hurdle (e.g. by releasing the game through Quixe), I think you're absolutely right. This is a great way to teach newbies how to form IF commands, while allowing them to progress through a game while they do so.

Pretty much all of the glulx interpreters support hyperlinks (aside from those designed for terminals). For typed keywords on any system, though, you could use the same interface used for supplying a inferred noun to show the player the whole command:



The new glulx feature that allows you to replace the text on the command line would be another option; perhaps something similar is also possible in TADS?

--Erik

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Glimmr: Advanced Graphics for I7
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I prefer how Ecdysis does this:



"Take plate" will appear on the statusline when the mouse is hovered over "plate", so you don't have to click first to know the command that will be generated.

It would be kind of cool if this happened as a tooltip in browser-based terps. I don't know how hard that would be to generate, though.

Unfortunately, the hovering effect you describe is next to impossible with Glulx games: Hover behavior is not a feature of the VM, and even if your interpreter/Glk library shows a tooltip over the link on hover (as Zoom/CocoaGlk does), Glk represents the link as a number--and that number, which is pretty much useless to the player in nearly every situation, is what appears in the tooltip. It's possible that with Quixe you could do better by using javascript to tack a title attribute on the <a> elements as they are displayed, but I'm not familiar enough with Quixe's internals (or the prospective javascript-game interface) to know how feasible this would be for the average game author at present.

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Glimmr: Advanced Graphics for I7
blog | download | bug-tracker

This is actually not a feature of the TADS VM. It's during output that the text gets parsed. For example, the above is achieved by the game by printing this:



The HTML Parser (and not the VM) will then print "plate" in the game window, make that word clickable, and generate a "Take the plate" command when the player clicks it and also show it in the statusline when the mouse is hovered over "plate."

I suppose that to duplicate this with Inform, it would need to go into Glk (output layer), not Glulx (VM).

Well, the hyperlink system's usability would be narrowed if the Glk layer insisted on treating links as texts to be entered on the command line. Currently, hyperlinks can represent anything that the author wants them to: the game just needs to convert the number returned into the appropriate value and do something with it. Most often authors do want a link to insert a given piece of text at the command line followed by a terminator--but certainly not always.

If hyperlink tooltips were added to Glk, one way it could be done is with an optional argument to glk_set_hyperlink that would display the tooltip on hover, while the absence of the argument would suppress the tooltip.



This would have a minimal impact on the current functionality.

--Erik

_________________
Glimmr: Advanced Graphics for I7
blog | download | bug-tracker

Thanks for pointing out this aspect of the hyperlink model. I hadn't thought about tooltips / visible targets.

Getting strings out through the API is a nuisance, but it's clearly useful in more than one situation (arbitrary style names, for example). I will think more about this.