Release 13 is now up, and the conversation graph is getting fairly complex. There’s still lots of room for contribution, though — small contributions fleshing out the story are just as welcome as more ambitious ones.
The thing is starting to run with more delay than I would like. I have some ideas about how to streamline this, but can’t do so this afternoon. (Some of it has to do with the collaborator interface itself, but I will want to optimize any pieces that will wind up in the final game.)
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
Not sure if you want feedback here or by email, so feel free to delete the comment if this is the wrong place…
The game (releases 10 and 13 anyway) bloats up to an unplayable size very quickly on both gargoyle and glulxe-term in Debian GNU/Linux – I think the furthest I’ve got in is the fourth command, and sometimes it’s become unplayable before I type *anything*. Not sure what’s causing that, as I’ve been doing a WIP that on the surface should be at least as bloated without any problems…
I did notice a bug in the first few turns – if you say the haven is too far to reach, and *then* say you want to stop to collect the heart, that’s considered a new quip – I think that should probably still go to the reaction it would have done a turn earlier.
Finally, is it just me or is the story being hinted at in those first few turns inspired by Neil Gaiman’s Snow, Glass Apples ?
Quibbles aside, though, this is a fascinating experiment, and I look forward to playing the finished game if I figure out a way round the bloating problems…
The game (releases 10 and 13 anyway) bloats up to an unplayable size very quickly on both gargoyle and glulxe-term in Debian GNU/Linux – I think the furthest I’ve got in is the fourth command, and sometimes it’s become unplayable before I type *anything*.
Is it becoming too slow to respond? Or (if not) what do you mean by this? If you mean something about memory consumption, then I can think of some reasons why this might be hogging it — there are some features of the collaboration interface and the graph-building routines especially that require very large arrays of information. Those won’t be in the final build, but if they’re making things hard to play even for collaborators, I could switch the graph-building stuff off in the collaboration release.
Finally, is it just me or is the story being hinted at in those first few turns inspired by Neil Gaiman’s Snow, Glass Apples ?
I’ve never read it.
I did notice a bug in the first few turns – if you say the haven is too far to reach, and *then* say you want to stop to collect the heart, that’s considered a new quip – I think that should probably still go to the reaction it would have done a turn earlier.
Hm. Well, okay.
It’s slowing down to the point where it won’t even respond to keystrokes – you can type things and it won’t even echo to the screen. Looking at the system info, it doesn’t look to be using a huge amount of memory – but it *does* use between 67 and 99% of the CPU, and seems to hang at that.
(Incidentally, I think my first comment reads as rather blunter than I intended – I really do think this is a great idea, and the little of the game I’ve played is very promising.)
That’s really odd: it almost sounds like a problem at the interpreter level rather than the game level. I’m seeing some slowness (a delay of a few seconds) after pressing return under certain circumstances, but the game by definition should not be processing during periods when it’s waiting for the player to type and press return.
Anyone else had this problem?
(Incidentally, I think my first comment reads as rather blunter than I intended –
Nah, don’t worry. ‘It doesn’t work on my system!’ is entirely valid and very important feedback!
Yeah – I would have thought that it would be an interpreter problem, but those two interpreters seem to work reasonably well with other games…
Well, I’m sure there’s something about Alabaster that is *triggering* these problems — maybe something about the way it uses memory.
Later I’ll try releasing a version of the game with the graph-building stuff taken out, and see whether that helps.