The long wait is over! Vorple has been completely rewritten and is now compatible with Glulx instead of Z-machine. That means that it's finally feasible to write Vorple stories with Inform 7 without having to worry about Z-machine limitations.
To those who are new to Vorple, it's a set of Inform extensions and a custom web interpreter that lets you issue JavaScript commands from the story to the web browser. The extensions use this to expand Inform's capabilities by making it possible to add external features like popup notifications and to modify the interpreter layout and output, for example with font styles and colors.
There are a lot of new features and extensions and existing extensions have been greatly expanded. Here are all the included extensions in addition to the core Vorple extension:
- Command Prompt Control — manipulating the player's command, the prompt, and the command history
- Element Manipulation — low-level tools for modifying the interpreter layout
- Hyperlinks — clickable links that can trigger parser commands, web links or JavaScript code
- Modal Windows — popup windows to display information
- Multimedia — pictures, audio and playlists
- Notifications — small information windows that appear and disappear automatically
- Screen Effects — font styles, colors, text alignment, headers, lists
- Tooltips — tips that appear on demand or when placing the mouse cursor over something
Many existing features have been redone or renamed, so existing Vorple projects are likely to need some adjustment to get working with the new version.
The long changelog can be read here.
What does it mean that it's a preview? There are still some known issues and missing features that should be in the "final" version. Here's the relevant part of the documentation:
Quote:
The previous versions of Vorple worked only in the Z-machine format, which severely limited the size of the stories that were possible to write, especially with Inform 7. The current release is compatible with Glulx which in practice eliminates all size limitations. The latest version is still a preview, so while it’s stable and works, it hasn’t gone through rigorous testing and may contain unexpected problems.
These are the currently known major issues:
- No Internet Explorer support — the system should support the latest versions of all major browsers, but the interpreter engine uses a feature that doesn’t work in IE 11.
- Functionality in mobile devices hasn’t been thoroughly tested, and some features are known to not work on mobile devices, e.g. most of the sound system (although partly because of inherent restrictions in mobile browsers that can’t be fully circumvented.)
- Some planned features are not ready yet. In Vorple Screen Effects setting font styles for the entire page isn’t implemented, neither is setting colors to an arbitrary value from inside Inform. The transient text feature is removed from the Screen Effects extension and will be included in a future text animation extension. Vorple Modal Windows has only the basic functionality.
- Displaying text in an element that’s not the main text flow may cause insertion of additional line breaks to the story output in Inform 7. This may happen depending on the location in the Inform code where it’s executed.
- The prompt is printed twice when the story ends.
- Opening multiple modal windows in succession with Vorple Modal Windows may cause the modals to act erratically.
- No status line – the status line extension is “almost there” but doesn’t work well enough to be published.
Also the technical documentation is incomplete. Most functions in the JavaScript API are documented in the code. Technical documentation is necessary only for developers who wish to integrate Inform with their own custom JavaScript code or other JavaScript libraries, so it doesn’t affect “normal” use of the Inform extensions.
The current list of known issues is
for the interpreter here and
for the extensions here.
So the system works, but there's still work to be done. If you have a "serious" project in mind, Vorple is stable enough to use. The Inform phrases are unlikely to change much between now and the full release.
To get started,
download Vorple and
read the documentation. Each extension has its own documentation included with the extension.
There's a demo which is still rather ascetic — one of the things that are on the to-do list for the full release.
The purpose of this preview release is to get some more people to try the system. If you do try it and find bugs, it'd be great if you could report them — either to GitHub (links are at the end of the quote above) or here, private messages work too. I would also be interested to know if the documentation and installation instructions needs improving, especially since it needs some setup to get going.
Hugo Labrande is working on the Inform 6 version which is almost ready, but didn't quite make it for today. If you're interested in the I6 version, either trying it out or contributing, you can contact Hugo directly (forum user
mulehollandaise.)
If you happen to be near London in about a month, I'll be talking about Vorple via Skype at the
Oxford and London IF group's IF Tool Innovation meeting on May 31st.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
Members
