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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: buzzard 'terp reviews
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Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 09:43:21 GMT
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Rating the Windows interpreters

I noticed a lot of stupid brokenness in interpreters
this year. Some of this is stuff that's been there
for years, but I'm only noticing it now, or it's only
mattering because so many other things are breaking.
Some of this is also stuff you won't agree with because
I'm something of a curmudgeon. (PS: I dashed this off
kind of quick, and I didn't thoroughly investigate all
the terps to see what problems they had; these are just
what I noticed while playing.)

Some general complaints:

"Large Fonts":
   Windows supports a desktop font-scaling setting ("Large
   Fonts") that scales up all your fonts "behind the back"
   of applications. This makes many applications (not just
   IF) behave poorly when they don't account for the real
   font size. That may explain some of the behaviors, since
   I use that setting.

Scrollback vs. Screen clears
   Don't clear the scrollback when you clear the screen.
   A lot of games had screen clears at major transitions,
   and if you wanted to go back and reread what happened
   right before the clear... oops. (I say which ones in
   the specifics below.)

Alt-F X
   Once upon a time it was a convention that all applications
   had a file menu, and all applications put an 'exit' command
   under that, and 'X' was the menu shortcut for exit. As a
   result, you didn't need to learn 'alt-F4'; you just used
   Alt-F X. Sadly, application developers who don't understand
   the idea that sometimes consistency is important have
   abandoned the file menu in programs that don't use files;
   or they don't support exit--for example Internet Explorer
   uses 'close'. But just because Apple has forgotten their
   UI lessons and MS never learned them doesn't mean everyone
   should abandon it.

GLK icon
   For some reason all the GLK-based games seem to use
   the same icon for their applications. This is really
   annoying when task switching, etc.

========================================================

Adrift:
   Mystery Manor was printing more than a screenful
   between 'more' prompts. [Probably the large fonts
   problem.]

Quest:
   The default font size was too small, so I changed it,
   but this only affect the output window; the input
   window and inventory/room display were still in
   the small font.

WinFrotz:
   If you go into scrollback and switch to another
   window, WinFrotz no longer shows up when you
   alt-tab to switch tasks. It fixes itself when
   you go out of scrollback mode.

   Broken Z6 scrolling.

WinGlulxe:
   This came up with the default font being MS Sans Serif
   which is a particularly ugly font at least on my
   screen.

   Suffers from the screen-clear/scrollback problem.
   GLK icon.
   no alt-F-X

HTMLTads:
   Suffers from the screen-clear/scrollback problem.
   no alt-F-X

2112 (custom terp):
   no prompt or some indication of where the input is
   screen-clear/scrollback problem
   no alt-F-X

Alan:
   This is a GLK based app. It also bears the horrible
   name "GLK Arun" which puts the cart before the horse.
   (This is the name on the window and also when you
   task switch, IIRC. It should be something like "Alan"
   or "Alan Runner" or whatever. A name that is meaningful
   to people playing the game, not the implementors or
   developers.)

   no-alt-F-X
   GLK icon
   probably the same font issue as WinGlulxe?

=============================================================

Complaining about the default GLK font may seem weird, but
all the glk-based games just bear a sheen of, I dunno, clunkiness
compared to the "more-native" interpreters like HtmlTads etc.,
but I suspect that's not the glk spec's fault but rather
the windows glk implementation's fault. But I could be wrong.

SeanB
