intfiction.org

I finally have a native build of Gargoyle for Mac that's worth sharing.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2759298/gargoyle-2010.1-mac_pre3.dmg

Please note that this is still beta quality; use at your own risk! It supports OS X 10.4+ on Intel and PPC.

You can report issues here, if you're inclined to take it for a test drive.

The main issues at the moment are:

• There is a considerable delay when Gargoyle is first launched, while fontconfig builds its font cache. Give it a minute or two before pulling the plug.
• Gargoyle takes over all file types that it supports. This is a minor convenience for testing and a major inconvenience for regular folks. Sorry! Removing and deleting the Gargoyle app will restore the previous default (e.g. Zoom).
• MOD playback is quite broken. Attempting to play a MOD file will result in silence if you're lucky, horrible noise if you're not.

For performance reasons, Gargoyle uses OpenGL to render screen updates on the Mac. Depending on your hardware, this should range in speed somewhere between "adequate" and "absurdly fast." If for some reason it seems inappropriately slow, I'm anxious to hear about it. I am unable to test it on a wide range of hardware, so any feedback will be quite helpful.

I just want to encourage everyone to give this a try. I've done some testing of earlier builds, almost exclusively related to Glulx multimedia. As far as Glulx goes, I have no reservations about saying that Gargoyle is the best, prettiest, and fastest interpreter available for OS X. Unlike Zoom, the runner-up, it has great sound support (except for MOD, as Ben said). The graphics-drawing speed is lightning fast on my five-year old MacBook, and the timer-code is vastly improved. If you've been playing around with Glulx multimedia, definitely give it a spin.

Gargoyle looks just as good on the Mac as it does on Windows and Linux. Previous Mac builds have been very stable, so also consider downloading Gargoyle to play just about anything else, from z-code to (text-only) Tads 3 games. File some bug reports and help Ben make Gargoyle an even better interpreter than it already is!

--Erik

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Glimmr: Advanced Graphics for I7
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I was under the impression that Spatterlight was actually "Gargoyle for Macs"...

Spatterlight is a very fine Glk implementation, but it is not the same as Gargoyle. I don't believe they share very much code at the library level, though I am not very familiar with the Spatterlight source. They have a similar set of interpreters, though Gargoyle's are more current since Spatterlight is not maintained.

Gargoyle uses Freetype to display fonts where Spatterlight and Zoom use native OS X font rendering. As a consequence, its output looks identical across platforms, and is more faithful to the font's design. It substitutes certain ligatures and replaces quotes with smart quotes. It uses subpixel rendering on LCD monitors and adds a lot of whitespace to make reading easier.

Because it doesn't use native text capabilities, some common UI features (such as scrollbars) are either implemented differently or not at all. This makes it difficult to compare to other libraries, which typically target one and only one UI toolkit. Readability is enhanced but at some cost to usability. Whether or not you find the program worthwhile will depend on which area you emphasize.

If you haven't used it before, it's worth downloading it to take a look.

w00t! All our pestering paid off!

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Blog at Gamasutra :: Programmer's Guide to Inform 7 :: Seattle I-F

Gargoyle is the terp I use actually. I'm on Linux. I was just surprised to see this thread since both Gargoyle and Spatterlight seem to have originated from the same person and, so I assumed, shared the same code.

Well, I was wrong.