[Pipmak-Devel] Re: Photorealistic Panoramas With Pipmak

[Christian W. <cwa...@gm...>]

D. Cooper Stevenson wrote:
> It turns out that there is an entire interactive fiction library
> (Inform) that does all of these things:
>   http://www.inform-fiction.org/index.html
> 
> The trick may be writing an interface between Pipmak and the Inform
> Library.
> ...
> Is it be possible to send short user messages between Pipmak and
> Inform?
> 
> Perhaps Pipmak could specialize in displaying the panoramic scene in
> lock-step with the adventure. That would boil the interaction to
> basically a one-way affair, such that Inform would pass something like
> the following to Pipmak when the user types "SouthEast" in the
> adventure:
>    pipmak.gotonode(18)
>    
> Two windows in the end: one for text/speech/music and one for the rich
> panoramic views.

I did not know about Inform (I've never been a fan of text adventures) 
and am just reading up on it. If I understand correctly, Inform is just 
an authoring tool, and the thing that Pipmak would have to communicate 
with is a Z-Machine interpreter. If we find some suitable cross-platform 
way of inter-process communication, I could probably do the Pipmak half 
of such a project, but since I know nothing about the Z-Machine, a 
Z-Machine expert would have to do the other half. Or, first, judge 
whether it is feasible at all.

So, you should probably ask that question on an Inform/Z-Machine related 
newsgroup and see what they say.

  -Christian