intfiction.org

Can anyone give me pointers to getting in touch with the authors of Twisty, Hunky Punk, and ZMPP? I'd like to suggest to all of them that they standardize on where they look for IF games, so that I don't end up with three copies of a game if I have all three terps.

If they read here, I'd propose that there be a single standard directory that they all look in, perhaps called 'Interactive Fiction', plus one directory that's named after the terp (e.g., 'Twisty' or 'Twisty Games'), for those games that only that terp can read.

Is ZMPP the same as JFrotz, or are there four? (or more?)

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Games, Fonts, and Font-Toys For Gamers - http://www.cumberlandgames.com

There are at least four, or more. I didn't know about JFrotz until you mentioned it here.

Please consider my request amended to include JFrotz. And any other as-yet-undiscovered terps out there.

Right And now I know about ZMPP! This works out since my desktop has icons in rows of four ... I now have an IF row

In terms of "standards," I just wish they all left it to the user to swap out from their preferred default. If each app wants its own "IF Folder" thingy, that's fine ... but lemme change it.

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Games, Fonts, and Font-Toys For Gamers - http://www.cumberlandgames.com

This would be satisfactory as well, provided that if I do change it, the terp remembers the change (i.e., I don't have to re-change it every time I run a new session of the terp).

Yeah, absolutely; the ability to alter the default and have it stick. And that way, none of them would have to rejigger their current defaults at all; the user could just choose which one he wants to point them each toward.

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Games, Fonts, and Font-Toys For Gamers - http://www.cumberlandgames.com

Hi, thanks for your feedback ! As I understand, all currently available Android interpreters should at least support 3,5 and 8 and all but one should understand 1, 2, 4 and 7 as well. I find JFrotz very interesting, since it is based on the original Frotz, but converted to Java bytecode and rendering to a custom-rendered terminal emulation.
You have a point there when you say that you'd like to have a shared IF story directory. I had thought about such a feature very early on, but wanted to store the stories close to the save games (another thing that I could imagine people would like to share between interpreters, but that is trickier). I could probably provide the option to change the search directory for Z stories.

I am currently taking some time off from ZMPP after getting burnt out a bit trying to make Glulx interpretation perform better on Android (a frustrating task when there are 10's of millions of instructions per turn on certain Inform 7 stories), but I'll add that when I am able to smell it again

Thanks,
Wei-ju

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Wei-ju Wu - ZMPP@github Blog Twitter

I don't understand why the terps have their own folders at all. Can't they just use the folder/s I've set up?

Searching a large SD card can take very, very long, depending on the number of folders (and files) you have. If the interpreter has to scan all of them recursively at each startup, you'll probably prefer to exit the interpreter after a minute rather than letting it finish
Setting it to one or a limited number of folders usually improves the initial scanning time dramatically.

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Wei-ju Wu - ZMPP@github Blog Twitter

Then don't scan without the user initiating it. Show a list of previous files opened by the user, an option for the user to find the file, and then lastly an option to scan the whole SD card.