How can I change the interface to look like Beyond Zork?

Question

Remember Beyond Zork? It's pretty much everything I want in my text adventure engine, but I can't figure out how to put the room description / inventory in a box at the top using Basic Screen Effects. It's just like display the boxed quotation format, but I can't seem to figure it out. Any help would be appreciated.

Comments

I have never played Beyond Zork so I am not sure of what exactly you would want it to look like, but I would say instead of using Basic Screen Effects you should use the Flexible Windows extension. The latest version, which is compatible with 6L38, is available here: http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=17425. Note that it is beta for 6L38 and has some issues around the edges.

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I don't know what exactly you're after - a screen shot from BZ would help!

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Joseph, that looks like glulx. )= I'm using a z-machine. Emily's extension works in there (as pictured), so maybe I can poke around in there and find some way to make text like that appear arbitrarily, or perhaps extend the status bar to do something like that...

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I don't think you can modify Z-machine to that extent (not an expert there so I could be wrong.) In any case unless you're planning to make a very small game you'll run out of Z-machine space and probably have to switch to Glulx anyway.

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That is a Z-Machine it's running on, so like, maybe it can.

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You could do that by hand with code to print the "status line" - that's all it is really, just an unusual use of the upper window.

Answer 1

As Dannii said, Basic Screen Effects can work, but (from my experience with Threediopolis) the problem is that you will need to account for line breaks in long text, which is not easy. BSE does not automatically give line breaks. So that is a lot of arithmetic.

Still, if you use shorthand in the status bar, it could work pretty easily. I don't know how much you've played with BSE, so you may know

deepen the status line to 10 rows

Works to get the size you want.

Then you can keep the room descriptions short.

That's the easy solution. A harder one may take more work. But it may be easier to just go with Flexible Windows.