Git and WinGLulxe problem
Peter Pears
Glulxe, and one of the games is Blue Lacuna. I can't believe the game
was not extensively tested, so the problem must be on my side - but
why on earth?
The other game was a "spaceship.ulx" game - a beta that appeared
somewhere on this newsgroup.
My problem is that in "spaceship", when I booted it up, exited and
booted it up again, I'd find that the game had rewired all the
background colours to *white*. Since I like playing with white letters
against black background, the resulting mess was white on white, and I
had to boot up Moments out of Time and City of Secrets - these two
games are the ones I've found that don't lock up user styles, so I can
change them back to the way I want them.
In Blue Lacuna, this only happens when a new window is open - namely,
the topic conversation window. When this happens, the window does open
as normally, but the next time it opens it'll be white on white,
instead of white on black. And if, at this point, I quit the game and
then return, I find that it's all white on white - in fact, in the
very first scren I can read the words "blue lacuna" in blue letters
against black background, and all of this against a white background
with white letters, forcing me to rearrange all the colours again.
This is very odd, and makes playing Blue Lacuna a hell of a chore -
not to mention whatever other games this may happen with.
*However*, I could play Carma, City of Secrets, Best of Three and my
own WIP (which has a separate window) with no problems. I also lodaded
up Los Alegres Hombres de Sherwood and other spanish multimedia-heavy
games, and in fact have booted up every single other GLulx game I
have, which means every single Glulx game in IFDB and in the IFArchive
(I'm a packrat). Only spaceship.ulx and Blue Lacuna have showed this
problem.
So... help? Pretty please?
Aaron A. Reed
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying this identical
behavior happens both with Git and Windows Glulxe?
--Aaron
Peter Pears
Yes. Just after posting this message I booted up Windows Glulxe, to
make sure, and got the same behaviour.
Incidently, if I press "K" right at the beginning of Blue Lacuna, it
also seems to trigger the problem when I next restart, without having
to come to a "open separate window" moment.
Aaron A. Reed
It's possible I'm somehow setting the colors incorrectly, in a way
that's not respecting user-set styles. I'm not certain if any of my
Windows testers had non-default colors set. I will look into this.
--Aaron
Eliuk Blau
> that's not respecting user-set styles. I'm not certain if any of my
> Windows testers had non-default colors set. I will look into this.
>
> --Aaron
Aaron, the best thing on Glulx is to define ALL foreground &
background colors for all GLK stylehints, explicitly. Even if you're
not going to use them. This is because each terp sets its own default
colors if the programmer has not made the suggestions of style.
The only two styles that you can set aside (if you're not using) are
style_User1 & style_User2.
Always, it is best to explicitly specify the colors for each style,
because in your terp the background could be white (default), but in
other interpreter could be black (default, according to its own
settings, for example).
Greetings!
Eliuk.
Aaron A. Reed
I've looked into this a little and I'm not sure exactly what's going
on, although it may be an issue with the "Glulx Text Effects"
extension. Blue Lacuna never does anything to the background color
explicitly, but yeah, in Git/Glulxe for Windows it seems to reset your
background to white when you load it up.
It looks as if all of the Glulx styles are rendering with a white
background, too. I set my background to black and foreground to white
for this screenshot; the line beginning "Tutorial" is just styled
using Inform's "italic type" statement.
http://www.aaronareed.net/git-ss.jpg
Any Glulx experts have any idea what's up with this?
--Aaron
Eliuk Blau
Yes. It is because italic type of Inform is not set the Glk empasizhed
stylehint with "black" background color. You must set explicity all
glk stylehints... see my previous message.
Cheers!
Eliuk.
Aaron A. Reed
But isn't that what it seems to be doing now, explicitly setting the
background to white despite the wishes of the user or author? If I
explicitly set the background to a color, aren't I locking the user in
to always using that background color?
--Aaron
Eliuk Blau
Aaron, I send to you a detailed mail about this (in spanish, sorry) =)
Good luck with Blue Lacuna!! :)
Eliuk.
David Kinder
> I've looked into this a little and I'm not sure exactly what's going
> on, although it may be an issue with the "Glulx Text Effects"
> extension. Blue Lacuna never does anything to the background color
> explicitly, but yeah, in Git/Glulxe for Windows it seems to reset your
> background to white when you load it up.
This looks like some sort of bug in the Windows Glk library. Using a
debugger I'm absolutely sure that the game does nothing to set the
background colour, so there must be something going wrong inside the Glk
library code. I'll look into it.
By the way, I'm going to disagree with Eliuk's advice to set all the style
hints for colours, etc. It's much better to just set the ones you want to
affect (as Blue Lacuna does).
David
David Kinder
I7 library that calls glk_stylehint_clear() to remove a style hint, which
Windows Glk incorrectly handles by resetting the style hint to its default
value, not the value chosen by the user.
I'll build a new version with a fix and get it released as soon as I can,
probably at the weekend.
David
Aaron A. Reed
Awesome!
Thanks for your detective work on this, David and Eliuk.
--Aaron
Andrew Plotkin
Affirm.
--Z
--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
Peter Pears
Hear hear!