intfiction.org

Hi everyone,
I'm happy to formally announce the Grotesque project, which is an interactive fiction library manager, primarily for Linux. *UPDATE*: you can now download a Windows version of it!

Some of you may already be familiar with the project. Indeed, it's been around for a couple years, but its last release in 2009 was version 0.2.1 and didn't have many features. With the permission of the original author, I resumed development this summer and I have since implemented many of the features that I think it was lacking, enough for me to decide to bump the version number up to 0.9.



Grotesque 0.9 features:

• Full Treaty of Babel bibliography support
• Fetch bibliographical information from IFDB
• Fetch and display cover art from IFDB
• Fetch and display (average) star ratings from IFDB (which can be
  overridden with your own rating)
• Quickly filter your library by author, genre, group, year published,
  forgiveness and minimum rating. Search the library by title (click in
  the library and start typing)
• Edit story entries
• Show/hide the bibliographic columns of your choosing
• Mark stories as new/played
• Improved story description layout
• Faster loading time for large libraries
• Recursively import a directory tree

With an eye to the future, there are two flavors available, one built for GTK2 and one for GTK3. If you aren't sure which to download, get the GTK2 version. Currently, I think only users of up-to-date Fedora, Arch, and OpenSUSE, for example, will have GTK3. Ubuntu will have it in the 11.10 release this October.

Homepage

Downloads (current version: 0.9.3)
http://grotesque.sourceforge.net/download.html

Arch Linux AUR
GTK2: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=28915
GTK3: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=51572

Gentoo


Debian/Ubuntu
*need packaging volunteers*

RPM
*need packaging volunteers*

So, give it a try and let me know what you think! Thanks!!

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Grotesque: an interactive fiction library manager for Linux
PyIFBabel: a Treaty of Babel library for Python

Between



and, from the GTK page,



it seems I will not be trying this any time soon, since I'm pretty much the end user of all end users, didn't even know there was such a thing as GTK, neither the official page nor this software's developer offer the necessary material for me to try it out (much like the creator of IFMapper always cheerfully assumed with every new release that everyone would know how to install/update his RubyGemsOrWhatever application), and despite me having been waiting for something like this for a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time.

Guess I'll just have to wait longer, but hey, good work - it looks great, and is just the sort of thing I'd use a lot, if I didn't have Windows.

By the way, I suppose there's an easy way to add games to your library that are not compliant with Treaty of Babel? And that I can, say, add "tzx" games and open them with the interpreter of my choice, or at least with the program that is defined in my system to run "tzx" games? You don't mention this in your blurb, and if it's currently not supported, I would suggest you think it over.

I'll see what I can do about packaging it for Windows. I have packaged Python/GTK applications in the past for Windows, but it's been a while. I'll give it a try today!!

Currently, you can add interpreters for any kind of game you can imagine. However, at the moment, if the program cannot extract *any* information from the file, it will give up. It already allows manual entry of game information on games in which no bibliographic information could be extracted, though. I could easily change it so that even if it failed to read the file, you can still manually enter the info. It should be pretty straight-forward to implement. Thanks for the idea!
Do you have any example files that aren't ToB-compatible that I can test with?

_________________
Grotesque: an interactive fiction library manager for Linux
PyIFBabel: a Treaty of Babel library for Python

I would suspect most Spectrum games would fit the bill, you can download them in all format from http://www.worldofspectrum.org/textadv/index.html. You can also check out DOS-based games, or Commodore, or amiga, or Apple II. Amiga and Apple II particularly I don't see being ToB compliant.

Incidently, I took a stab at trying to download Python and GTK. My diagnosis: I really, really suck at it.

EDIT - Incidently, I shouldn't fail to emphasise how pretty it looks, despite its name.

Ok yeah I have some DOS .exe games that I can try working with.

Sad note: it will be ugly as sin on Windows. (at least the last time I used a GTK program in in Windows, it was bad.....btw GTK is the toolkit that I used for the interface, so that which defines the buttons, list views, drop-down menus, etc).

_________________
Grotesque: an interactive fiction library manager for Linux
PyIFBabel: a Treaty of Babel library for Python

Well, that's a pity, but if it works at all I can cheerfully live with it.

Unfortunately, to build it for Windows, it looks like I will actually need Windows.

Nonetheless, it looks like it will be pretty straight-forward to do using py2exe. If anyone out there is running Windows, has Python installed, and would like to help, please contact me! I don't think a lot of Python knowledge on your part will even be necessary; I still have config files from an old project I did this with, so we can probably mostly copy those.

_________________
Grotesque: an interactive fiction library manager for Linux
PyIFBabel: a Treaty of Babel library for Python

If all that's required is an installation of Python 2.5 and py2exe, and if the process is that automated... well, I'll give it a go and let you know if I actually manage anything.

Ok, I can successfully build a Windows EXE, however it runs into problems with importing.

Good news: I'm 99% sure I know what the problem is (windows + gdk threading don't play nicely together, if anyone's curious)
Bad news: it requires some major restructuring to implement
More good news: I think I need to implement this restructuring to fix some problems that people are experiencing in Linux too (it's partly related to, for example, the Loading Library dialog at the beginning not going away, which is because of a problem with threading).

I'll report back here when I get it working. Let's hope for it in Grotesque 0.9.1, which I hope to complete in the coming week or so, if all goes well.

_________________
Grotesque: an interactive fiction library manager for Linux
PyIFBabel: a Treaty of Babel library for Python

jakobcreutzfeldt, I can surely say I would kiss you right now if you were on the same room as I am.

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