[i6] creating .zblorb?

I’m using RInform (Inform 6 Russian localization) on Windows for game authoring. I want to include some meta data along with my game (i.e. game title, author info, cover art maybe) and I’ve been told that the only way is creating .zblorb file out of my z5. I’ve tried to google some zblorb packaging tool but didn’t succeded.

Could please anyone point me to that tool if it even exists? Also I didn’t find any information on how prepare that metadata for my game.
Please help.

The easiest way to do it, in terms of programming and setup etc required, is to download Inform 7 and use its release options.

Chapter 25 of the manual lists all the options it’s mentioning, such as how to make cover art etc.

If you’re on Linux or some other Unix, use this: github.com/DavidGriffith/blorbtools

This is peculiar. I can’t get it to work using 6M62 on Windows. It builds a web page, but the play in-browser link leads to an empty Parchment window. The zblorb file works just fine in Gargoyle, so there seems to be a bug somewhere when converting it to .js. Or I could be way off base.

If anyone working in I6 is interested, I have a Makefile example that takes a Z file, reads the release, serial and checksum out from the appropriate offsets, then generates an iFiction file and runs cblorb from the I7 suite to package it into a zblorb with cover art, iFiction record and proper IFID.

There are also clear spots in the Makefile for putting a description into the iFiction metadata.

Only caveats are that you need cblorb from the I7 package and Cygwin with a working make, hexdump. Oh, you also need a blurb file for cblorb that includes any cover art image and references the iFiction record the Makefile is generating. I suppose you could have the Makefile generate that too. I don’t because I’ve got a lot of pictures and sounds in mine as well.

Oh, it works for Glulx too.

I found it’s far easier and more maintainable than trying to graft an I6 built externally through the Inform7 tools directly.

I’d like to see this Makefile.

It’s all in the Makefile, which works with GNU make. The game is in Inform 6, obviously.

A sample project (testgame) is attached.

“make” makes both glulx and Zcode (ulx and Z5) as “debug-enabled” builds and does not build gblorb or zblorb files.

“make blorb” builds a stripped “release” version of both Z5 and ULX, as testgame.gblorb and testgame.zblorb. This is the version that includes the iFiction record and cover art.

I left the current zblorb and gblorb in the archive just so you can see what they would be like in case you have trouble recreating them.

My next step was going to be to get the Makefile to name the output gblorb and zblorb in the proper style, e.g. testgame-ZCODE-1-171227-FF06.zblorb or testgame_GLULX-0549554950-171227-4A01F417.gblorb. Haven’t done that yet. Left as an exercise : )
testgame.zip (802 KB)

Interesting concept. I’ve been thinking about how one should do this for I6 games and so far haven’t come up with a clean way to do it. I’d like to use this as a starting point for a metadata generation script be included in my blorbtools package.

That would be fine with me, especially if you can make it work without the need for Cygwin or a Unix machine.

Here’s an updated version… I had misread the Babel spec for Inform-produced Glulx files so I was using 6 bytes in the “release” spot instead of just 2. This version corrects that issue.
testgame.zip (887 KB)

This seems it could be well-suited for GitHub.