Re: Map in 'curses' & xzip complaint


Mon, 3 Apr 1995 13:17:51 -0400

Excerpts from mail: 3-Apr-95 Re: Map in 'curses' & xzip .. Jonathan
Badger@phylo.li (1098)

> Anyway, two examples of fixed width fonts that I know
> of is the map in Hollywood Hijinks and the map in Curses. The Curses
> map doesn't work in Xzip. (proportional fonts), I am not sure about
> Hollywood Hijinks -- I didn't play that with Xzip. Do you need a
> Curses save game to test?

No, I have Curses. You're correct that the map displays in the
proportional font, and is hard to read, but *I've* complained about
that! As far as I can tell, Curses does *not* invoke the z-code
fixed-width font command.

In fact, I tried playing with Inform, and it doesn't seem to have an
option to set fixed-width fonts. The error string says 'The style can be
"roman", "bold", "underline" or "reverse" but not...' This is Unix
Inform 5.4 (v1401/a); does a later version allow this?

> Speaking of Xzip, one thing that is annoying is that the status window
> is its own window, which makes games that use it a lot (and make it
> more than 1 line) such as AMFV or Curses difficult (it's easy to miss
> information that is covered by other windows). Could you maybe add the
> option to have it work in a normal fashion ala zip?

It's a massive pain, because the status window has a fixed width, and
the game window should be user-resizable. You do not, trust me, want me
to try to create L-shaped windows...

I've found that putting the status window north of the game window, just
barely overlapping the title bar, with the status window in front, is
the right effect. If the status window expands it covers up the top of
the game window, which is what you want.

(Actually I wish Trinity had never used that damn resizing trick)

--Z

"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."