I've set up an online interpreter for Hugo games. It's basically the same tech used by Internet Archive's online MS-DOS games collection: a JavaScript version of DOSbox running the DOS version of the text-only Hugo interpreter.

The major missing feature is the ability to save and restore games – or, more accurately, the saves aren't persistent between sessions. You can save and restore while playing the game but as soon as you close the browser window the saves are lost. There seem to be a couple of techniques available that might help so this is probably going to get fixed later.

The interpreter is at nitku.net/if/hugo with a small library of games. For now you can only play the games that are pre-compiled for the interpreter. Later I'll add a feature to upload your own story files.

For people interested in Hugo innards or stuck with Hugo games I've also made a .hex story file parser that can extract just about anything there is to extract from a Hugo story file: Dictionary, text bank, objects, grammar, ... It can even output the Hugo bytecode in a (slightly more) readable format. The .hex parser is at nitku.net/if/hugo/hexparser.

The generated reviews are saved and can be retrieved with the same URL for sharing the best ones.

Here are the major new features:

• Works with Undum. Now someone might wonder why anyone would want to record hypertext fiction stories, but even if there's less need to check what kind of input readers give, other reasons still apply: you might want to get statistical data on which choices the readers make, or see if the readers give up at some certain point in the story, or even find out if some of the choices just don't work as they should.
• Web interpreter template for Inform 7. There's a ready-made Inform 7 template to use with the "Release along with an interpreter" option. This makes it easier to start using the recorder although you still have to set up the database and the server scripts.

The project's new headquarters are at Github along with the instructions and downloads.

The plugin saves more than just plain text: it preserves text formatting and saves status lines as well, so the transcripts look (almost) the same as the actual game. (See this example of Bronze with status lines, colors and text formatting. Note that Parchment uses small caps in place of bold text.) The saved transcripts can be viewed with or without the status lines. In addition when the game waits for a single keypress, non-alphabet characters like enter, space and arrow keys are marked in the transcript.

There's a live demo with a transcript viewer available. Games played in the demo installation can be seen in the viewer.

The plugin and accompanying tools can be downloaded from Google Code where you'll also find installation instructions. Only Z-machine is supported at the moment, Glulx support will be added later.

Try it out yourself: Click here to start a game and then open this page to a new browser window. Enter a command in the game and see how the transcript in the live feed updates. (If you don't see your game in the live feed page, reload it. It shows the three latest games being played at the time the feed page was loaded.)

And then there's the beef: I've made a rudimentary statistics page that shows some interesting information using the collected data, including most used commands and average turn count and playtime.

The obvious use for this is of course collecting information on how people play the game and using that information to make improvements for the next release. You could also use this for closed beta-testing -- give the web address to your testers and Parchment saves the transcripts automatically. The testers don't have to remember to start the transcript or send it to the author.

Statistics from other games

First I want to stress that at the moment this is just a demo of a hack. It can and will behave strangely especially if the game bypasses the standard parser and takes input directly (menus etc.) That said, if you want to try other games than the sample game, you can use either http://parchment.game-testing.org/demo/parchment.full.html?story=xxx or http://parchment.game-testing.org/play/parchment.full.html?story=xxx (replace xxx with the full url of the game you want to play.) The difference is that the latter doesn't have the live transcript feed and only has the statistics page (note a different address than what the demo site uses). You can't single out individual players from the statistics so there's no disclaimer notifying the player of the data collection (which might unnecessarily scare off some players.)

The statistics page collects information and displays the urls of all games played this way, so don't use this for trying out something you don't want the whole world to see.

How it works

I've added AJAX calls inside Parchment's UI code at appropriate places where it sends the player's command and the game's response to the server. On the server a PHP script receives the data and saves it into the database. This is all done behind the curtain so for the player the gameplay experience is exactly the same as with unmodified Parchment.

The statistics page collects some extra information about Inform 7's internal error message and library message codes. This requires some modifications to the game file itself. The Raising the Flag on Mount Yo Momma game used as the example has been modified to include this:

That code shows the error codes and the library message ids after every turn in the prompt, for example #LIBMSG:40#>. When the modified Parchment sees these strings it saves the information in them and removes them from the output so that the player doesn't see them. Played on any other interpreter the game would of course display these, so the last line of code warns the player that they shouldn't be using this game file if they can see the control codes.

Unfortunately the error codes and library message codes aren't very reliable; some parser errors don't seem to have an error code and some library messages don't have an id. Most noticeably the "unknown verb" error doesn't have either, so it doesn't show in the statistics. I don't actually know what the codes really do, I just noticed they're there and used them; future development would include using custom codes for different situations in the game.

Future plans

• Test it more and fix bugs so that it could actually be reliably used.
• Clean up and comment the code so that it could be packaged for people to install on their own servers.
• Create a service where people could have saved transcripts and command statistics behind a password so that they could improve the game for later builds or use Parchment to save beta-testing transcripts.
• Add more information and charts to the statistics page (suggestions welcome.)
• Try to convince Parchment developers to include this functionality into the main build or provide hooks so that this could be added as a plugin. Right now I'm just modifying Parchment's code directly, so whenever Parchment is updated the files have to be edited by hand again.

What would you like to see done with this?

→ IF Name Generator Comp 2009 edition

Edit: Now featuring all IFComps beginning from 1995. Also, an option to generate the names using only IFComp titles. Have fun!