bundling a game and an interpreter on the mac?

Hi. I’m not sure if this is the write place to post this, so move it if you must.
Is there a way to bundle an interpreter (spatterlite or Zoom) with a game (E.G. TADS or Inform) as a single mac app?
I know J.D. Clemens did something like this for his game “Möbius”, but I can’t find it anywhere.
Any help would be appreciated.

I never came up with a good solution. For Hadean Lands, I made a ZIP file containing Gargoyle and the game file with a README saying “Run this thing and load this other thing.”

Another problem easily solved with FyreVM and separating story from UX.

This is limited to Windows machines, but if you distribute WinFrotz or WinGlulxe/WinGit (depending on your game) along with your game, which let’s say it’s called ThisGame.gblorb (for instance), and if you rename WinGlulxe.exe to ThisGame.exe…

…then upon loading the interpreter it will immediately load ThisGame.gblorb, as long as it’s in the same directory.

I dunno how many interpreters do this, though. It’s a good trick.

I am still wanting to make an OSX package for Kerkerkruip, but haven’t got it working yet. (I haven’t worked on it for many months either though.) Gargoyle doesn’t seem to allow being repackaged, so I was investigating whether we could embed it entirely within another package.

If I ever get it working I’ll try to remember to let you know.

Gargoyle doesn’t. Wish it did.

I did not know this unknown thing and now I know this newly known thing.

Thanks.

Hugor has this feature as well.

edit: Whoops, I guess this only applies to Hugor on Windows and Linux.

I did a quick cut at bundling Quixe with Electron (Chromium in an app shell). It’s just a proof-of-concept right now, but it runs, and it would let you distribute Mac/Win/Linux binaries without much work.

the ios frotz has the games precompiled into the app due to apple rules I used compiled very loosely.

Awesome! (Presumably it would work the same for parchment?)

How is the speed? Are you thinking of using it for your games?

It will work the same for Parchment, except that I’m not sure how saving files will work. I’d like to upgrade Quixe to use native file dialogs and save real files when it’s running under Electron. Someone would have to do the same for Parchment.

The speed is the same as running Quixe under Chrome.

I’d like to distribute Hadean Lands this way, but the speed makes it iffy. Not hopeless, but iffy. (Big “go to…” action sequences can take up to 1 second on my Mac. On a slower machine it would be unpleasant.) Smaller games should be fine though.

If I wanted to get really sneaky, I’d have Electron launch remglk/glulxe as a subprocess…

Or compile it to a .dll/.so/.dylib so that it could be used the same way Gargoyle is. Well that’s my long term future goal :slight_smile:

It doesn’t? (I thought it was GPL v2 or later.) Or did you not mean license-wise?

I meant trying to move the gargoyle binary into a different package doesn’t seem to work.

By the way. Does GPL terms apply to my game (z5 file) if I package it into Windows installer with Gargoyle? I mean I must to provide my game source code then?

No, that’s just considered a bundle.