Gnusto

In time for PAX East 2011, I've just launched Parchment's new domain: iplayif.com! Parchment finally supports Glulx games as well! Just to prove it...

It also has a fancy search thingy, allowing you to easily search hundreds of stories from the IF Archive (although you may be better off using the IFDB instead.).

As always, post bugs to the tracker. And I'll try to make it prettier soon, I promise!

Enjoy!

Hi all!

I've just pushed some major changes to the live version of Parchment, resulting from merging in the library branch to the master branch!

What does this mean?

Well the biggest change is that the VM launcher code has all been rewritten, along with the file downloader. This means that raw story files can now be loaded directly in modern browsers. I have begun working on cross domain loading as well, though that will be harder.

The second more minor though potentially more useful change is that the default story file is now easy to change. Doing so is as simple as adding one of these lines to your parchment.html:

<script>parchment_options = { default_story: './story.z5' };</script>

<script>parchment_options = { default_story: [ './story.z5', './story.z5.txt' ] };</script>

If you can base64 encode your file, use the second option to specify it as the backup (for older browsers which cannot directly load the raw file.)

Finally, together with Zarf we have fixed some of the longest existing bugs. With the development of a new Z-Machine unit test we will hopefully be able to catch and fix bugs quicker in the future.

You can download the updated files from GitHub: http://github.com/curiousdannii/pa…
To use Parchment on your own website grab parchment.html, parchment.css and the lib folder.

Thanks for your support, and keep watching for more exciting changes in the future!

Back in 2004 marnanel suggest having a webpage version of Gnusto - something that has now been realised through Parchment.

Up until now Parchment has been used straight out of the SVN repository, which is not really ideal for several reasons. I would like to move it to a new domain, and would like your help in picking one!

• My first though was to choose a domain with parchment in it, perhaps parchment-if.com.
• We could also enquire whether the Gnusto domain could be used (as marnanel suggested), though honestly this wouldn't be my preference.
• But I now am thinking that something like play-if-online.org or playifonline.org would work better. It better describes what it is: a place to play interactive fiction online. A .org domain would be prefer purely because that's what the archive and wiki have. Sure it will detract from the Parchment brand name, but is that really a big problem? And anyway, if a better web interpreter were ever developed I'd prefer we replace Parchment with it but retain the URLs.

Thoughts?

Hi all,

I'm now developing the Gnusto engine at GitHub primarily for use with Parchment, though if someone wanted to use it again for an extension that would be great too!

We've been finding and fixing several bugs. For example, did you know that the not opcode was broken (and presumably always has been)? Well not anymore :)

The roadmap:

• Consider making parts of the engine more generic to have compatibility with Quixe
• Hopefully make Gnusto independent of any major libraries. Small ones like the Class and IFF will be included
• Stop it polluting the window namespace, perhaps consider other validators or strict mode
• Let it be used in a Web Worker
• Add a unit test suite (planning to write a new inform assembler first though)
• Lots more optimisations
• Lots more fun!

Did I miss anyone out of the contributors file?

-Dannii

WooHoo!

How did I miss Gnusto getting a new version for the first time in a year and a half?

Anyhow, I quickly downloaded it to a PC running Windows XP Professional in Firefox 2.0.0.1. I was excited to see it actually install again.

However, my excitement abated when I immediately ran into a problem with a file. First off, to test, I clicked on the link to Zork 1 in the Gnusto page that automatically comes up. I did not see any complaint, but the link did not seem to do anything. Copying the link location into the location bar did not load the page either. So, I downloaded the z5 file and opened it locally.

Locally, it showed the opening script and began to play. However, whenever the text reached the top of the window, instead of scrolling off, the game halted with the "Press any key for more..." message in the bottom left. This happened whether it was run in a tab or a window. Is there a local setting that can be changed to turn off scrolling or something else to get this working again?

Thanks again for bringing this development back to life!

I had a massive hard disk failure, so I'm reinstalling all my applications. When it came to Firefox, I immediately went to install Gnusto, but 0.7 only works up to Firefox 1.0. Also the Firefox Extension page has loads of people begging for a new version or saying they'd never have upgraded if they'd known Gnusto would stop working.

Knowing about the nightlies page, I tried installing directly from there, but 0.8 only works to Firefox 1.1. Is it easy to confirm compatability so your many fans can continue to use your excellent program?

I've noticed another little oddity. Infocom's Trinity uses several screen pauses for dramatic purposes. Normally, this is no problem, since Gnusto catches the output and pauses at its own screen size. However, in this game, when you go through the first white door at the beginning, Trinity writes out a message about the voice in your head talking to you as you step through the door yada yada yada, then pauses for input before printing the title screen. In Gnusto, however, the moment you step through the door, the screen wipes and displays the title screen. This seems to happen even if you shrink the Gnusto window (just in case scrolling to the bottom of the output skipped the pause). The behavior seems similar to the way Gnusto behaves oddly when you restart a game. (Does it take the line feed from the "y\m" answer to the restart question and feed it back to the beginning? I always assumed that was the case since restarted games either skipped a screen pause or complained about unknown input.)

Okay folks, assuming Marn doesn't nail down a way to make untyped MIME handling work on OS X in the next day or two and you guys don't find any show-stoppers, Release Candidate 6 may actually be Gnusto 0.8.

Notable changes from RC5 are:

1. Quotation marks and certain other punctuation marks weren't being correctly handled in v3 games (as reported in by an anonymous user-- feel free to identify yourself so we can give you credit in the release notes!). That issue is resolved in this release.

2. There are some cosmetic improvements-- the 10 Most Recently Played Games list on the File menu now lists the game name first followed by the full path in parenthesis (rather than just the full path as it did before). Under the old system, games stored in deeply buried directories could appear in the list such that the name of the game itself wasn't visible. This frequently happened when playing games launched from links online as the temp file was stored in the profile-- always a deeply nested directory. Window titling is handled better, though still not ideally in all circumstances.

We've now tested under Linux the handling of links to z-code files with improper MIME types-- works fine, though you have to launch Gnusto once before it gets registered as a helper app to take care of this. Same on Windows. The feature is still disabled on OS X.

The nightly is available here.

Thanks for testing!

Okay, it's another release Candidate. Getting really close, I hope. Still really need some validation under Linux.

Many thanks to demonfile, who tested RC2 and reported in some bugs, many of which are (hopefully) fixed in this release! If we had T-Shirts, we'd give you one.

This release fixes several bugs related to transcription, uses a different strategy for registering to handle z-code files served up with the wrong MIME type, and doesn't attempt to register as a Helper App on MacOS (doesn't work due to OS reasons, so we shouldn't offer).

If you open up a Gnusto window and go to the Tools Menu in that window, there should be a "Register Gnusto as Helper App" option. Choose that and Gnusto should handle z-code files regardless of reported MIME-type from then on. As usual-- give this a shot and then try clicking on this link here. If it launches Gnusto, the Helper App registration worked. If not, let us know and we'll see what we can figure out.

Update: Wow, you can tell I'm tired. I forgot to post a link to the new Release Candidate. You can download it from here. Thanks!

Okay, second release candidate is ready to test. Should be mirrored out to this directory in the next few hours. I'll post a direct link in an edit in the morning. Need sleep now, though.

Only major difference from Release Candidate 1 is that it now provides visible feedback that Gnusto is handling the download when you click on a link to a z-code file.

marnanel's been testing RC1 on the Mac and it looks like the handling of incorrectly MIME-typed files may be more challenging on that platform. Some digging in Bugzilla seems to point towards it being OS-specific. Works fine on Windows, though. I suspect it works fine on Linux as well, but am still awaiting confirmation.

Enjoy!

edit: Here's a more proper link: Gnusto 0.8 Release Candidate 2