[I7] Does "Release along with an existing story" still work?

This came up in a recent thread, where I realized I couldn’t get even a simple example of I6 code working with Parchment. Which left me in a sticky situation. I have a project or two that I plan on doing in I6 and publishing via this method, but I can’t get the most minimal example from the manual to work.

Worse, knowing so little about that part of I7, I’m not sure how to begin debugging. How to even reproduce it?

So I guess what I’m asking is, has anyone else successfully released an I6 playable web page under I7 6M62? Should I file it as a bug?

I just tried, and I can’t get it to work either. (I’m using Windows.) Releasing creates an html page with a “Play in Browser” button, but it doesn’t work.

Actually I can’t get “release along with an existing story file” to work in 6L38 either. I just get a “compiler unexpectedly failed” message.

This is a known bug, see http://inform7.com/mantis/view.php?id=1918.

Is there a version that has worked in the past? So far I’ve tried 6L02, 6G60 and 6E72, all of which produce a compiler error. Surely it must have worked at some point?

It’s entirely possible that this has never worked; it’s not a very commonly-used feature, and evidently no test cases cover it.

I’m reasonably sure that it worked at some point, but I don’t know when.

You can use github.com/erkyrath/quixe/blob/ … game2js.py to generate the correct .js file from the .z5 or .zblorb file.

Thank you, that did the trick.

In case anyone else is curious, “Release along with an existing story file” works fine on Windows with 6M62. However, one caveat is that you cannot use Z-Machine version 5 story files. I have not tested on other platforms yet.

That seems like an odd caveat, since neither the IDE nor the interpreter cares about Z-machine version.

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.

Actually, will work with .z5 files, but only if you name the file story.z8 anyway in the .materials folder (despite it being a z5 file)

or Release along with an existing story file called “story.z5”

But that just makes a nice zblorb which works in gargoyle etc.