Gargoyle
Gargoyle is a multi-platform, multi-if-system interpreter for Interactive Fiction. It focuses on good typography in games. Because it uses a Glk API library, it does not support any additional windows besides the status line. That said, there is support for both sound and graphics.
Media in Gargoyle
Music and graphics (that are displayed in the main window) will be heard and seen just fine. As the resource files are accessed, the individual song or graphic file is dumped into the game’s directory. This is not ideal from a Hugo author’s perspective, but there are two ways to get around this.
Glk.h
The more forceful approach is to use a library contribution like Glk.h to determine if your game is being played on a Glk-based interpreter. If it is, you can choose to not play the music file or display the graphic, giving Gargoyle nothing to rip out of the resource file.
Include a configuration file
Gargoyle only tries to play resource files if the configuration file
tells it so. You’ll notice that Gargoyle is distributed with a file
called garglk.ini. Make a copy of that file and rename it to share the
same name as your game. Edit it and change the graphics and sound
settings to the following:
graphics 0 # enable graphics
sound 0 # enable sound
If that file is in the same directory as your game, Gargoyle will not play the media. Of course, this is easily changed, but your intentions will be clear.
Sample configuration files
As mentioned in the previous section, it is possible to write a Gargoyle configuration file so you have some control over how your game looks. Here are several Gargoyle configuration files written to emulate the color schemes of their original versions.
| Gargoyle configuration file | Hugo game |
|---|---|
| pirate.ini | Pirate Adventure |
| pmime.ini | Pantomime |
| scourgdos.ini | A Crimson Spring |
Also, both Cryptozookeeper and Tales of the Traveling Swordsman were distributed with Gargoyle configuration files included.