Archived from groups: rec.games.int-fiction,rec.arts.int-fiction (More info?)
Hello...
A few years ago, I had the crazy idea of writing my own Z-Machine
interpreter from scratch. Partly I was motivated by the desire to hone
my atrophying programming chops, partly because I had some ideas for new
features I wanted to try out, and partly (SIGH) because it seemed like a
fun thing to do at the time.
Well, after several concentrated bursts of activity punctuated by some
much longer lulls, I have something that I think might be of interest to
the wider community. And so, I present Filfre, also known as Yet
Another Windows Z-Machine Interpreter. This one does has some neat
features that I think are sort of cool, however. Whether these
particular fireworks are gratuitous, I will leave to you to decide for
yourself.
First of all, Filfre integrates its scrollback buffer with the main
screen. Cutting and pasting, text finds, etc., can all be done from the
main game screen with no need to go to a separate scrollback screen. I
find this incredibly convenient. Your mileage may of course vary.
I've also added some features that I hope might benefit those who are
not the best typists or (dare I hope) curious newbies to this whole text
game thing. Double clicking a word anywhere in the text will paste it
to the command line. The player can also choose to display menus of
command verbs and prepositions as well.
There is also an option to display the player's current inventory and
the object tree for the current room, all clickable as above. This is
slightly more problematic as it requres a bit of "meta-data" from
outside the story file. I have provided this information for many games
of the past already, along with instructions for creating it for
yourself if you are so disposed. Hopefully the help file will make this
clearer.
With these menus enabled, Filfre will work something like the old Legend
games. There has been occassional discussion here from players desiring
to see such a thing, so perhaps this will be at least a start in
answering those wishes.
For those who are not interested in that aspect, Filfre will hopefully
be a nice, functional interpreter with a nicely integrated scrollback.
(In case you haven't noticed, I REALLY dig this particular feature. I
have my own doubts about the usefulness of some of the rest of the stuff...)
Filfre has been pretty well tested, and I feel it is fairly polished and
complete at this point, although I do have some more cool ideas I might
like to try. Still, I have a feeling that some bugs might crop up in
wider use, so I am still calling it a .9 beta release. With that in
mind, bug reports are welcome and in fact abjectly pleaded for if you do
decide to try it out and run into any.
I'm afraid the source is much less polished. It is almost completely
uncommented and thoroughly disorganized, but I am making it available in
a separate zip both in case someone can make use of it and in case
anyone wishes to audit the code before running it on their machine.
I'll try to clean it up soon... really I will.
Please note that the source is dependent on Borland's VCL libraries.
This is not a concern for running the interpreter, as no additional
libraries or DLLs are required, but you will need one of Borland's
development environments to compile it. This will also probably make
porting to other platforms something of a dead issue. Sorry about
that... if I started this project today I would probably take a
different route, but that's hindsight for you, isn't it?
In other possibly gloomy news, Filfre fully supports Z-Machine versions
3, 4, 5, and 8, but does not (and probably will not ever) support
version 6. Its screen model just wasn't compatible with my display
methodology, and at the end of the day I decided that the 5 released
version 6 games just weren't worth the trouble when there are other
interpreters that play them perfectly well. I'm really sorry about
that, but I hope you can understand.
As of right now, filfre is sitting in the incoming directory of the IF
Archive, but I assume it will shortly be available in unprocessed:
ftp://ifarchive.org/if-archive/unprocessed/filfre.zip.
Source will be at:
ftp://ifarchive.org/if-archive/unprocessed/filfre_src.zip.
Once the wise and benevolent maintainers decide on a permanent home for
it, I will update this thread with that info.
Whew! Thanks for reading, and I hope at least a few people find Filfre
to be of interest.
Thanks a million,
Jimmy
Hello...
A few years ago, I had the crazy idea of writing my own Z-Machine
interpreter from scratch. Partly I was motivated by the desire to hone
my atrophying programming chops, partly because I had some ideas for new
features I wanted to try out, and partly (SIGH) because it seemed like a
fun thing to do at the time.
Well, after several concentrated bursts of activity punctuated by some
much longer lulls, I have something that I think might be of interest to
the wider community. And so, I present Filfre, also known as Yet
Another Windows Z-Machine Interpreter. This one does has some neat
features that I think are sort of cool, however. Whether these
particular fireworks are gratuitous, I will leave to you to decide for
yourself.
First of all, Filfre integrates its scrollback buffer with the main
screen. Cutting and pasting, text finds, etc., can all be done from the
main game screen with no need to go to a separate scrollback screen. I
find this incredibly convenient. Your mileage may of course vary.
I've also added some features that I hope might benefit those who are
not the best typists or (dare I hope) curious newbies to this whole text
game thing. Double clicking a word anywhere in the text will paste it
to the command line. The player can also choose to display menus of
command verbs and prepositions as well.
There is also an option to display the player's current inventory and
the object tree for the current room, all clickable as above. This is
slightly more problematic as it requres a bit of "meta-data" from
outside the story file. I have provided this information for many games
of the past already, along with instructions for creating it for
yourself if you are so disposed. Hopefully the help file will make this
clearer.
With these menus enabled, Filfre will work something like the old Legend
games. There has been occassional discussion here from players desiring
to see such a thing, so perhaps this will be at least a start in
answering those wishes.
For those who are not interested in that aspect, Filfre will hopefully
be a nice, functional interpreter with a nicely integrated scrollback.
(In case you haven't noticed, I REALLY dig this particular feature. I
have my own doubts about the usefulness of some of the rest of the stuff...)
Filfre has been pretty well tested, and I feel it is fairly polished and
complete at this point, although I do have some more cool ideas I might
like to try. Still, I have a feeling that some bugs might crop up in
wider use, so I am still calling it a .9 beta release. With that in
mind, bug reports are welcome and in fact abjectly pleaded for if you do
decide to try it out and run into any.
I'm afraid the source is much less polished. It is almost completely
uncommented and thoroughly disorganized, but I am making it available in
a separate zip both in case someone can make use of it and in case
anyone wishes to audit the code before running it on their machine.
I'll try to clean it up soon... really I will.
Please note that the source is dependent on Borland's VCL libraries.
This is not a concern for running the interpreter, as no additional
libraries or DLLs are required, but you will need one of Borland's
development environments to compile it. This will also probably make
porting to other platforms something of a dead issue. Sorry about
that... if I started this project today I would probably take a
different route, but that's hindsight for you, isn't it?
In other possibly gloomy news, Filfre fully supports Z-Machine versions
3, 4, 5, and 8, but does not (and probably will not ever) support
version 6. Its screen model just wasn't compatible with my display
methodology, and at the end of the day I decided that the 5 released
version 6 games just weren't worth the trouble when there are other
interpreters that play them perfectly well. I'm really sorry about
that, but I hope you can understand.
As of right now, filfre is sitting in the incoming directory of the IF
Archive, but I assume it will shortly be available in unprocessed:
ftp://ifarchive.org/if-archive/unprocessed/filfre.zip.
Source will be at:
ftp://ifarchive.org/if-archive/unprocessed/filfre_src.zip.
Once the wise and benevolent maintainers decide on a permanent home for
it, I will update this thread with that info.
Whew! Thanks for reading, and I hope at least a few people find Filfre
to be of interest.
Thanks a million,
Jimmy
Thanks for trying Filfre out 
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