Feedback on Parchment
Dannii
interpreter.
Since Parchment was introduced a year and a half ago we've had a lot
of people use it and tell us they love it! We now regularly have
hundreds of users a day, and sometimes that count reaches the
thousands.
But I don't feel I really know what Parchment's users think about it.
The amount of feedback we receive has slowed somewhat.
So, if you've used it, what do you think? Any comments at all would
wonderful. What do you like, or dislike? Any bugs? Features you wished
it had? Had any crazy dreams that involve Parchment?
Jim Aikin
>
> So, if you've used it, what do you think? Any comments at all would
> wonderful. What do you like, or dislike? Any bugs? Features you wished
> it had? Had any crazy dreams that involve Parchment?
Parchment is a terrific, forward-looking development. Kudos!
In the "crazy dreams" department, though ... how about adding support
for HTML TADS?
This would be a big job, I'm sure. But there _is_ a world beyond Inform.
--Jim Aikin
Paolo Lucchesi
> So, if you've used it, what do you think? Any comments at all would
> wonderful. What do you like, or dislike? Any bugs? Features you wished
> it had? Had any crazy dreams that involve Parchment?
First of all, thanks for the wonderful work you're doing.
I don't know if it's possible: an option to make parchment generate HTML
instead of plain text (so that I can put HTML tags - styles, images,
links - in my story). Obviously I have to generate a specific parchment
story file, but the results can be really interesting.
Also, a bit more of documentation about the whole project and the local
installation would be nice (I use only the files in the lib folder,
right now).
Crazy dreams: Glulx support, obviously (Tads too, but here's we don't
have any Tads localization yet).
Anyway, again, thanks a lot.
bye
--
Paolo Lucchesi - pluc...@NOSPAMtin.it
Dannii
Thanks for your comments guys!
Glulx and TADS support... well Glulx support will definitely happen.
TADS, maybe. It's too complicated for me honestly. I have no
experience even using the system, and couldn't write a new
implementation. But if anyone else writes a JS implementation of it,
I'd definitely want to incorporate it into Parchment! :)
As to a new IO system, that is being discussed now. Go join the
Parchment group to add your thoughts if you want!
What specifically would you like documented more? I agree we need
more, I'm just not sure what for.
namekuseijin
parchment-playable games. and hey!, I can play at work! :D
I don't have criticisms or any feature ideas other than the ones
presented already. It's really a terrific piece of javascript
code... :D
Looking forward for Glulx and if TADS was ever supported it'd be too
good to believe... I lust for the day when ifarchive uses it. :)
Andrew Plotkin
>
> But I don't feel I really know what Parchment's users think about it.
> The amount of feedback we receive has slowed somewhat.
One easy thing I can think of is offering a choice of stylesheets on
the web site. It would be nice if a game author could post a URL of
the form:
http://parchment.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/parchment.html?stylesheet=STYLEURL&story=STORYURL
You can do this by hosting the Parchment code on your own server --
you've seen my (still-in-progress) Dreamhold page -- but a drop-in
solution is tidier.
The biggest use case for this, by the way, is not palette or font
tweaking, but giving the game window a scrollbar. This came up in the
jayisgames comp.
(Browsing through your site, I see it's already in your issue tracker. :)
Okay, I register a vote for it.)
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
weevil
direction for web IF.
My wishlist for parchment is all stuff I've already suggested-
Package it up into one javascript (besides jQuery) so that it's easy
for users to install on their own pages.
Make sure styling and layout is done in CSS, not in the javascript, so
that the content and style are separated and easily modified.
Glulx support, at least in it's very basic form. Exotic layouts are
possible in glulx, and that would fight with the idea of using CSS for
layout, but Inform 7 has a habit of creating huge story files for even
modest games, and Glulx is the only way to play them. Also, glulx
image support would be cool, and the ability to send those images to
easily put those images inline or in their own div. Jquery animations
to fade between images would be really cool, and was something I could
never get to work with Iffy's javascript component.
The ability to hotlink or tag text in the story could be used to
interesting effect, but I'm not sure how you would execute it exactly.
I suppose you could write html in your say statements in inform and
then parchment would know to interpret them as html? maybe there could
be some new convention for this?
Again, keep up the great work.
mont...@gmail.com
work on my smartphone. I've tried with Opera and with Skyfire on my
Windows Mobile device, and neither works. Seems they don't recognize
the ">" prompt as a field for entering text. I don't know if this is
a Parchment issue or a browser issue, but I'd love to be able to play
when on the bus!
Other than that, it's superb!
James Cunningham
Although it does work on the iPhone (and prettily), many games simply
run too slowly to be playable. We may be a ways off before mobile
telephones are sufficiently powerful to run complex JavaScript apps
well; either way you're not missing a whole lot for now.
Best,
James
Otto Grimwald
> So, if you've used it, what do you think? Any comments at all would
> wonderful. What do you like, or dislike? Any bugs? Features you wished
> it had? Had any crazy dreams that involve Parchment?
Hello,
like many people, I really think Parchment is a very cool webapp, and
even if zmpp is great too, having a pure JS interpreter is lighter for
people (and more widespread)
We propose all "our" French IF games with Parchment by default now, with
possibility to play with Zmpp or Zplet as well, so it's great because
the games are immediately accessible:
http://ifiction.free.fr/index.php?id=jeux
From a "webmaster" point of view, I think it's not really easy to embed
parchment into a page with custom CSS (or maybe I'm just not a very
talented web designer...).
From a player point of view, I think Parchment is working well, but it's
not as pleasant as using frotz, fizmo or gargoyle, first because it's a
bit slower on a weak machine (but it's rather ok and acceptable anyway),
and also because you can't use the page up / down on keyboard and the
mouse wheel is too slow for scrolling (even on the official project's
page). What is strange is those 2 issue are not present on the Dreamhold
showcase, so maybe it's just a matter of default configuration?
http://eblong.com/zarf/zparchment/dreamhold/
Andrew Plotkin
>
> From a "webmaster" point of view, I think it's not really easy to embed
> parchment into a page with custom CSS (or maybe I'm just not a very
> talented web designer...).
Putting a few sample, well-tested CSS files into the Parchment
distribution would be good. Zog knows I'm having trouble making the
Dreamhold page work acceptably across all browsers. (Currently it
looks great on Safari/Firefox, completely falls apart on IE, and I've
broken the iPhone input box somehow.)
> From a player point of view, I think Parchment is working well, but it's
> not as pleasant as using frotz, fizmo or gargoyle, first because it's a
> bit slower on a weak machine (but it's rather ok and acceptable anyway),
> and also because you can't use the page up / down on keyboard and the
> mouse wheel is too slow for scrolling (even on the official project's
> page). What is strange is those 2 issue are not present on the Dreamhold
> showcase, so maybe it's just a matter of default configuration?
> http://eblong.com/zarf/zparchment/dreamhold/
All I did (for scrolling) was "body { overflow: scroll; }".
Well, there was a bunch of other CSS futzing I did at the same time.
Otto Grimwald
> All I did (for scrolling) was "body { overflow: scroll; }".
>
> Well, there was a bunch of other CSS futzing I did at the same time.
>
I copied most of your settings and css in my website folder. Now it's
much better and I could understand a bit what you changed. I can get the
page up / down action and the correct mousewheel behavior, the only
thing missing is the text flows out of the right margin (and even
outside the main window).
I don't understand why, because even when copying your exact code for
the css and html, I'm still getting this text overflow.
Andrew Plotkin
I wound up making some changes to the Parchment javascript code as
well. I thought they were only relevant to the status line layout, but
obviously my memory is weak.
I don't recommend copying my changes; they are built on a copy of
Parchment from several months ago. I will work with Dannii on getting
them integrated.
ChicagoDave
I like Parchment, however what I'd like to see is extensibility. Is
there a way to have in-game (non-player, out of world) communication
with the external website javascript?
Maybe a way to trap output that's prefixed with some character combo,
that then is pushed off to non-VM javascript.
So if you get %%CMD["doMail","f...@bar.com", "My subject", "Hey! you
found the treasure!")]%% in the output, you redirect this to the
doMail js function with the given arguments.
The idea is that a game could be embedded in a website and as you
play, the website changes, an e-mail is sent, a twitter feed is
pinged, an IM is sent, a text message is sent, or something else
interesting happens.It makes the game sort of like a Reality TV IF
game.
David C.
www.textfyre.com
Conrad
>
> The idea is that a game could be embedded in a website and as you
> play, the website changes, an e-mail is sent, a twitter feed is
> pinged, an IM is sent, a text message is sent, or something else
> interesting happens.It makes the game sort of like a Reality TV IF
> game.
Or, a transcript is automagically sent to the author, so that every
player becomes a post-Beta tester.
Some might want to turn it off for privacy. But I think it'd be a
useful feature.
Conrad.
ps - I'd like to see TADS online, too, although I understand there are
technical barriers.
Jon Ingold
> Or, a transcript is automagically sent to the author, so that every
> player becomes a post-Beta tester.
I think this is the single most useful feature an online interpreter
could have (well, second to the fact you can update the game file in
the background and fix bugs. So long as no-one's saved, of course).
The other thing I'd really like to see is an output feed that eats
error messages after they've become irrelevant. If a player types
three broken/misspelt/wrong commands in a row, they a huge chunk of
valid game text, face a permanent reminder of their mistakes, an
advert for how stupid the parser is, and are rewarded for typing in
rude words. Instead, when the player types in a new line of input, any
previous old line which reported an parser fail message should be
quietly deleted... (sadly, I don't think you can do that purely at the
interpreter level, but I'd like to throw it out there.)
cheers
jon
Grey
> So, if you've used it, what do you think? Any comments at all would
> wonderful. What do you like, or dislike? Any bugs? Features you wished
> it had? Had any crazy dreams that involve Parchment?
I love parchment!
Just a question...sometimes it can open blob files (.zblob), and other
times it give an error. I don't know if they're supported at all.
It would be nice to open blorb files, more and more games are being
released in that format.
Dannii
fix it now. I'll push the change to the live svn soonish.
David, I do plan to have support for such things in the future. The
real plan is for a new Glulx IO system, though I think we'll probably
start with an unofficial and simple version for the Z-Machine. I
haven't figured out a good security model for it yet though.
I love the idea of sending a transcript to the author. It wouldn't
even need any VM changes. JS can't send emails, but it can POST data
to a web page. So how about adding a new field to iFiction files for a
webpage to send transcripts to. <transcriptpage>? Then, if this is
present, when either the game finishes, they close the page or we get
a fatal error, we can ask the user if they want to submit their
transcript to the game's author. This field can be removed for the
final release.
Jon, interesting idea. Does anyone else feel similar? It's not a
complaint I've heard before. Though it's equally a complaint that
would apply to every other interpreter too.
Grey, at present it can only handle blorb files up to 1MB in size. I
will fix this in the future, but other things are more pressing.
Generally this is caused by large cover images.
ChicagoDave
Why do you need to worry about security? The only thing I was
suggesting is that an external javascript command be able to be called
dynamically from a known command template.
The rest is up to the author to create javascript functions that do
the work. So if I wanted to send an e-mail, I could make an AJAX call
to a back-end server to do the work.
David C.
www.textfyre.com
namekuseijin
> If a player types
> three broken/misspelt/wrong commands in a row, they a huge chunk of
> valid game text, face a permanent reminder of their mistakes, an
> advert for how stupid the parser is
the player types broken text 3 times in a row and the stupid one is
the parser?! Sounds like "the customer is always right"... ;)
> Instead, when the player types in a new line of input, any
> previous old line which reported an parser fail message should be
> quietly deleted...
yes, it'd be a good improvement anyway.
Dannii
That would work fine for customised parchment sites, but the big
picture is including JS in the blorb so that they'll run in all
parchments (and even desktop terps), hence the need for a security
model.
ChicagoDave
> That would work fine for customised parchment sites, but the big
> picture is including JS in the blorb so that they'll run in all
> parchments (and even desktop terps), hence the need for a security
I'm very interested in a custom web-only based setup. :)
David C.
www.textfyre.com
Ron Newcomb
I love both of those. The first is especially useful for more
experimental works. The second is nice for beautifying the "live"
transcript.
Danni wrote:
> JS can't send emails, but it can POST data
> to a web page.
What does that mean? Would an author have to have his own webserver
to use it??
Dannii
>
> What does that mean? Would an author have to have his own webserver
> to use it??
Yes, though it's easy enough to set one up, for example on Google's
App Engine. If people are really struggling about this I could even
write up something simple that takes the POST data and emails it to
you.
Conrad
> Yes, though it's easy enough to set one up, for example on Google's
> App Engine. If people are really struggling about this I could even
> write up something simple that takes the POST data and emails it to
> you.
Does Parchment work for Inform 6?
If you get this working I guess I'll have to drop TADS.
Conrad.
Andrew Plotkin
> On Feb 5, 6:53�pm, Dannii <curiousdan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Yes, though it's easy enough to set one up, for example on Google's
> > App Engine. If people are really struggling about this I could even
> > write up something simple that takes the POST data and emails it to
> > you.
>
> Does Parchment work for Inform 6?
Parchment runs Z-code game files. Future expansions are likely.
Conrad
> In rec.games.int-fiction, Conrad <conradc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Does Parchment work for Inform 6?
>
> Parchment runs Z-code game files. Future expansions are likely.
Is that yes or no?
C.
Andrew Plotkin
It will run Inform 6 and 7 games if they're compiled into Z-code.
Conrad
> It will run Inform 6 and 7 games if they're compiled into Z-code.
Good to know... Thanks!
C.
namekuseijin
hey, ever heard of Infocom?
Conrad
Yeah, the robot you kill in one of the Zork games. So?
C.
namekuseijin
That's actually Frobozz. You don't kill him until later during the
Wizardry saga.
So that I thought being intimate with Infocom would also mean being
intimate with the z-code format... for a cook you're pretty short-
tempered.
Alexander Mospan
allow play in russian translations of great inform games. Thank You.