Wow

Within just a couple hours of that last post, I was blown away by the generosity of a donation.  Not having any huge Roodylib-related tasks on my plate right now, I decided that it's time I put more effort into making Roodylib's documentation presentable.  I spent a couple hours already making an outline of topics I'd like to cover (with it all being easily browsable), resulting in this:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Il43tgoKx1urUcJMkpAJLVH9UupLFi3IL_ICEbg9QNU/edit?usp=sharing

I still have to order it so all of the things most useful to new authors and authors-getting-acquainted-with-Roodylib are explained first.  Right now, the plan is to write the entire thing in LibreOffice, but I may export to PDF for the final copy (in the past, I used an open document just because I figured I could use it basically as a fancy readme text file, but I guess there's no real reason I can't just make the whole thing look nicer).

Anyhow, one thing I'd probably like to do in the documentation is have bits of sample code here and there.  Anyone have any experience with inserting code in open documents (what styles/formatting look best, is there a nice extension for this, etc)?  So far, googling hasn't exactly been my friend, and any advice would be appreciated.

added a paypal button

Now, considering that Hugo has like 5 users in the world, I don't actually expect any money to come in, especially with everyone having mortgages and family and this and that to take care of.  Just the same, things have been tight for me, too, and I figured I might as well put the option out there just in case anyone wants to contribute but just hadn't thought of it yet.

To be perfectly honest, donations probably wouldn't make the next major release of Roodylib come out any quicker (since I work on it pretty consistently anyhow), but if any patron has a particular feature they'd like to see incorporated into Roodylib (or the creation of a useful object class), those things will be given a high priority.  Actually, even if you can't afford to donate anything, if anyone has anything they'd like to see, just let me know.  I'll probably do it, ha.

I was going to finish this post with links to other people who I feel contribute a lot (much more than myself) and would be great options to support, but finding donation buttons for them was harder than I remembered.  I'll have to edit this post after I've talked to them to see if there are pages I've missed.

Configuration Files

I don't remember what prompted it, but something got me thinking about configuration files in Hugo and how I never perfectly designed a way to detect if an interpreter fully supports them.

See, the FILE_CHECK constant-checking method described in the Hugo manual doesn't work with Gargoyle.  Not only that, but Gargoyle can read configuration files- just not write to them- so if a configuration file has been created by another interpreter, previously, the game could easily be tricked into thinking everything is working fine.  Adding even more complication is that configuration-file-writing does work in the glk Hugo interpreter (even though no one ever uses that one) so I couldn't just do a simple "minimal port"check.

So I brought my attention to this the other day.  Eventually, my fix for the problem involved using Hugo's system-time-catching functionality (along with Future Boy!'s time-handling routines) to take the current time, save it to the configuration file along with everything else, then read the time back from the configuration file.  Then it calculates the difference between the two times, and if it's longer than 5 seconds (I'm trying to account for really slow computers here even if a 2 second timer would probably still be playing it safe), it calls the configuration error routine (so a game like "the Halloween Horror" can quit out, as it relies on configuration files).

In other news

Herr Jizaboz finished his demo game about a tourist in North Korea.  I've helped him with it here and there.  I hope people get a big kick out of it!

A Day in DPRK

Also....

Looks like there was a Notepad++  update so I also updated the Hugo Notepad++ distribution.  You can get it here.

Formatting

In that last bout of Roodylib attachables improvement, playing around with the "Vault of Hugo" sample game made me check out some other things, too.  Specifically, I was reminded that Roodylib's doublespace formatting option worked imperfectly.  This is how it looked when it attempted the Vault of Hugo's "Object Room."

(there are no commands listed since it is the result of a recording playback)

As you can see, spacing is inconsistent, with no extra lines between the two items with short_desc's (and all of the non-short_desc-related objects are clumped together, too).

I set out to fix this- and not only that, as I also decided I wanted Roodylib to have an option for smart room descriptions if the player is in an object (I had gotten a test case of this working months ago but it still required some code clean-up and adapting to put it into Roodylib).

Not only this, but I also wanted to make sure that rooms printed properly with the LIST_F format option on.  This is the setting that does "tall" listings like those in Zork:

>look

West of House

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.

The small mailbox contains:

  A leaflet

>

I can't remember how broke the alignment was before I started this latest wave of improvement.  Might have not been that broke, but with Hugo, "The small mailbox contains:" was indented once and the next line twice.  This was probably intentional, but to be honest, I prefer the Zork version.  Hugo also didn't capitalize the article for children like "A leaflet".  I've changed that, too, since again, I liked the Zork way.  If I had my druthers, I'd make both of these things optional but as it is, configuring DescribePlace to your needs is already going to be a bunch of global variable tinkering and flag setting.  Still, one day I might re-design the WhatsIn and ListObjects routines so they're much more configurable.

While I was at it, I also added my system for smarter listing when the player in a container in the room (it's possible to configure it to also do platforms, but it was hard to come up with a wording that'd work for all cases- if you're on a chair, do you really want to describe all other objects in the room as "off the chair"?).

FORMAT global set to DESCFORM_F and COOL_PARENTS flag set

FORMAT with LIST_F (you'll notice that I changed how Indent works with LIST_F just so the two systems use the same logic)

The cauldron and the grandstand listed are not in the original game.  I added them just to test the part of DescribePlace's code that lists the children of scenery items.

Now let's take a look at some of the behavior if the NEW_DESCRIBEPLACE flag is set.

NEW_DESCRIBEPLACE with doubles-pacing on

The new DescribePlace defaults to having children of scenery listed right away, right after children of parent-of-player.  I figured it's better for them to be closer to wherever they were mentioned in the room text.  Ideally, I'd have an extra check in there to list attachables-connected-to-scenery objects right up there, but I don't think that comes up enough to justify the extra work for now.

With double-spacing on, it only prints newlines (and the extra space) when it needs to.  All those extra spaces might look kind of ugly in that example right there (since that room has so many objects), but I'm fairly certain that it'll look quite nice in the average IF game.

I'm pretty happy with the different options I've given the DescribePlace system although the extra settings I've created could probably use some finessing.

Right now, there are the following additional Roodylib options:

• Set the "COOL_PARENTS" flag (this gives the room better relative text when the player is in a container in the room)...  My gripe about this name is that it's close to my SMART_PARENTS flag (which gives better responses when a player tries to go in an unavailable direction while, like, sitting in a chair or something).
• Give FORMAT the DESCFORM_I mask. DESCFORM_I gets rid of the extra new line before a room title is printed, based on Infocom layout (hence the I).  Just the same, the F in DESCFORM_F probably stands for "flag" so changing it to I is probably just confusing.
• Set the "NEW_DESCRIBEPLACE" flag.  This gives the extra functionality of the new DescribePlace code.  I'm pretty fine with this one.
• Give FORMAT the DESCFORM_D mask.  If the new DescribePlace system is on, this turns on double-spacing.

Beyond the probably-confusing names of my new masks and flags, I'm not sure I even want to expect new authors to know how to change this stuff- if I recall correctly, FORMAT masks are covered very briefly in the manual; pretty sure I learned most of what I know just by looking at hugolib.h.

I'd like to make it easier for authors by creating some routines that will set the game to the formatting they prefer, but even that is kind of a headache. *

* I was going to continue with the annoying aspects of trying to design and name helper routines, but I think I might have an idea I'd like to play with.  Stay tuned!