Cover art

I have entered my game into IFComp, and have just uploaded my cover art to the IFComp website, however I don’t understand how to attach my cover art to the game itself. I know that I can access the default images via the Release folder (Cover.jpg, and Small Cover.jpg). I have created my own cover art for the game, but before I do something like renaming it with the same file names as the default images and then telling the computer to replace the defaults with my image(and then adding the line ‘release along with cover art’ in the source code), I thought I would ask you all how to do it. I read 25.8 in the manual, but it doesn’t seem to be clear on this point. My apologies if this question has been asked before or if I don’t seem to understand what the manual is saying. But do I have the right idea–by renaming my image (Cover.jpg, and Small Cover.jpg) and opting ‘replace’ if/when the program asks me to, and adding the ‘along with cover art’ line…??

Thanks

Cover art is both a separate file, and I believe coded into the .gblorb. It has to be called Cover.jpg (or png) and Small Cover.jpg (or png) to be written into the file.

Whether cover art shows up or not with no author interaction as generated is up to the interpreter - Gargoyle doesn’t bother, Zoom shows the cover art briefly before starting, and Winglulxe shows a splash page with the cover and some of the library info with a play button. If you release with a website and an interpreter, the separate files display on the web frontend.

You can make your art show up within the game by declaring it as a figure and displaying it (see 23.5 and onward):

[code]Figure of logo is the file “cover.jpg”.

When play begins:
display figure of logo.[/code]

You have to make a figure folder inside of the materials folder and also include any picture you want to display there. In this case where you want to show the cover art in the game as “figure of logo” it needs to go both in materials and in materials/figures.

Thank you, Hanon. I will give it a try!

By the way, Hanon, it worked–I was able to substitute my cover art and the thumbnail for the defaults, under Cover.jpg and Small Cover.jpg. My interpreter is Windows Glulxe, and I have the game release with the website (of course not until after the IFComp). By the way, if I have the line ‘release along with …website’ line in my game, and it is entered into the IFComp, would this disqualify it…?? (the IFComp website says that when the competition begins, the games are released to the public–when my game is released like this, would that line automatically make it available to EVERYONE, including judges??).

Thanks so much.

Don’t worry. It means that Inform generates a website in your release folder. But this website is not automatically put online. Unless you do that yourself, it is just some files on your harddisk, not accessible to anyone.

If you release along with a website and an interpreter and zip so that index.html is in the top layer where the website can find it, when you upload that zip as your file to the IFComp site, you’ll get the Play Online button. Your game will run directly on the website without the player needing to download it. If I recall correctly, basically that means zipping up the contents of the release folder as they are (the files and subfolders in the release folder, not the release folder).

You can upload your game at any time (also update and remove it if necessary) and preview how it will look on the IFComp site to test it even before it’s done - your file won’t be made available or public until the voting period begins. I highly recommend that so any deadline uploads won’t be you tangling with technical details at the last minute.

Thanks a lot, guys!

I was able to preview and got the ‘Play Online’ button (along with ‘Download’ and ‘Walkthrough’)–and I was able to play the game online, and it worked just fine!

Thanks again!

It’s not working for me. I released my I7 game with a website, and I put everything in the release folder into a zipped file, but when I click play online, I get the message “Quixe init: Error: This is not a valid Glulx file. This is not a valid Glulx file. Error”

Any ideas?

[Edit: Problem resolved. My browser was caching the faulty version.]