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Start of Chapter 25: Releasing |
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Back to §25.10. A website |
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Onward to §25.12. Using Inform with Vorple |
Inform 7 Home Page / Documentation
§25.11. A playable web page
Modern web browsers are now so powerful as computing environments that they almost amount to general-purpose computers in their own right. The websites made in the previous section were passive, and simply displayed information about a story file. But it's also possible to make a more active page - one which can play the story file, right inside the browser, for anybody who visits.
To make such a page, we must:
This automatically releases along with a website as well, since we need the website in order to house the new page, which will be called "play.html". This page will be bundled up with a customised copy of a story file interpreter coded in Javascript - in effect, a program for a web browser to follow - and a suitably encoded version of the story file. The practical effect should be that anyone visiting the page with any modern browser can just play.
Inform ships with the "Parchment" and "Quixe" interpreters built in. By default Inform will use Parchment if the format (on the project's Settings panel) is set to Z-code, and Quixe if the format is Glulx. In fact, though, Parchment works with either format, and some users prefer using it. If we want to have Parchment even for a Glulx project, we can write:
...and that's just what will happen. In fact, Inform also supports the use of any other interpreter the author wants to try. If we have access to an exotic Javascript-based interpreter called, let's say, "Urbzig", then we can install it by putting it into the "Templates" subfolder of the ".materials" folder for the project: