intfiction.org

What's the state of glulx interpreters for unix/linux? Especially sound-capable ones?

I'm doing compatibility tests for my sound and graphics-using glulx game and at the front of the game, I want to give a list of sound+graphics capable interpreters for Mac, Windows and Unix. I'm not sure what to say for Unix. My research isn't turning up reliable answers (nor ones I can test. It's the only system I don't have.)

At the very least, make sure it runs in Gargoyle. Really, that goes without saying for all platforms.

Heh. So... are you saying, Gargoyle runs on Unix too and it sports sound?

It was written primarily for Unix so how could it not run there?

You guys may know all this, but random strangers like me don't

Gargoyle's homepage doesn't have the word Linux anywhere -

http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/

and neither does the downloads page:

http://code.google.com/p/garglk/downloads/list

I went to IFArchive too, where I saw some older versions for Unix, but then I didn't know if they had sound, or if sound was a recent addition.

In conclusion, I had no idea where Gargoyle came from, but now I do - a little bit. I still wouldn't want to have to field a quiz on the subject of its origins.

That's because they're listed here: http://code.google.com/p/garglk/wiki/Packages

If you haven't got a linux install, and you care about ensuring it works, you should really get yourself a linux install! Through much ingenuity you can even install distributions like Ubuntu as Windows programs: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/windows-installer

I believe Gargoyle is the only Glk implementation on Unix that supports sound, and apart from Spatterlight it is also the only one for OS X.

For best results when using Ogg, your sound files should be in stereo and have a 44.1 kHz sample rate, 16 bit samples. Other formats will work but will get piped through the SDL_sound conversion routines, the results of which are passable but deeply unsatisfying. (Sample rate conversions represent the worst case scenario.)

This is a Gargoyle-ism that I hope to eliminate at some point in the future. SDL development has picked back up recently and the forthcoming SDL_sound 2.0 is supposed to have its own mixer capabilities.

I know it's bad form to encourage authors to work around library limitations and I apologize for that. David Kinder's mantra of "fix the interpreter!" is appropriate and definitely applies here. But I haven't been able to find a good alternative to SDL that works reliably on the target platforms, so the best I can do for now is to point out that there's a "ideal" format for sounds played by Gargoyle and let you make the call.

Vorbis for audio is a good idea anyway, regardless of platform or interpreter. It's high fidelity at low size. MP3 makes zero sense anymore.

I use OpenAL with Alure. It may be overkill for Gargoyle, but I find it works well on all platforms. It was a bit of a hassle to compile on Mac (but so are many libraries that's started on Linux - universal binaries is not something they expect), but otherwise I've had no problems and my engine (SLUDGE) runs on all three platforms.

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Thanks for the pointer. I'll check it out. Do you happen to know if it works on PPC / OS X 10.4?