kach/ifplayer.js

Interactive Fiction player in nodejs

Description

ifplayer is a nodejs module to play interaction-fiction files.

It is currently alpha-state and pretty much in flux, and are my first steps at understanding the z-machine.

Dependencies

• To read the interactive-fiction files, it uses ifvms.js
• We borrowed the etude as a text file for now

Inspiration code

Take a look at : (thx to @curiousdannii)

• https://github.com/curiousdannii/ifvms.js/blob/master/dist/bootstrap.js to see ZVM being used in node.js.
• https://github.com/curiousdannii/parchment/blob/master/src/structio/runner.js is used in Parchment on the web.

It's designed to be used with Web Workers (though it isn't yet...), so everything happens with two functions: ZVM.inputEvent() and ZVM.outputEvent().

Installation

From this repo

$ npm install

From an official release (none yet)

$ npm install ifplayer

Usage

as console player

$ ./bin/ifplayer <your-story-file>

as a player object

ifplayer = new IfPlayer(filename);

ifplayer.on('output', function(message) {
  console.log(message);
})

ifplayer.on('quit', function() {
  console.log('done');
})

ifplayer.on('ready', function(message) {
  // ifplayer.send('north');
})

Bugs & Todos

• currently the input is also written on the output : not sure if this by design or not

• the flow of output is not caught when quitting

• we need to separate the css code to a more abstract type so we can pass our own formatter

• sending the inputEvent is still a mess , as I don't really understand the required params, currently resorting to keeping the last read event

• obviously support mode code types

• make it read gluxl files and other format

• maybe use Inform i7 compiler for on the fly compilation