Dual Monitor and images

I am new to Inform (only tried it out a few times). If I want to illustrate a game and I have large image files for the scenes, is there some way to play a game on one monitor and see the images in a different window on a second monitor. Does Inform have facilities for this, or is this out of the question?

Zarf started sketching out an extension to Glk to make this possible, but it’s never been more than a sketch: github.com/erkyrath/glk-dev/wik … ay-Support

Which is to say, it’s not possible now, but it could be in the future.

Inform itself does not, as most games are played in a separate interpreter by the player which you don’t have a lot of control over. And actually, it’s rare for games (other than Nintendo DS?) to support multiple monitors as an option other than just widescreen spanning. Multiple monitors is a hardcore gamer setup, but you can’t bank on it.

There have been strides towards an interpreter that is in a browser and can manipulate other browser windows which technically could accomplish this, but there are others who might be able to explain these developments better than I.

I think that’s still acceptable. I have another question regarding this. I was looking over some of the Extensions and they have a slight learning curve. I would settle for just opening an image per room on my main monitor. I installed Location Images by Emily Short from the public library of Inform 7. Is there a quick code snippet I can try out to test it. For example, my image sizes are 1280x720, so it’s ok to overlap with the text screen. I would like to quickly test how this would feel before I try to figure everything out. I would like to eventually export what I would make, to winglulxe - will programs using the extension work?. I just downloaded that also. I think that’s pretty much everything I need for text adventure development, except of course possibly more extensions.

Sorry for the many quick questions, just making sure I have something to play around with.

It’s hard to provide a code snippet - there is one in the documentation for this extension, but it requires you to have media named similarly to what the snippet specifies.

You may not be into this, but for test purposes you can actually show an image without an extension.

Make a folder called “Figures” in the materials folder, and put your images in there.

You need to declare the images (called “figures”) in Inform.

Figure of Woodlands is the file "Woodlands.png". 

To show the picture:

Display figure of Woodlands.

See chapter 23 in the documentation.