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Adventure Game News for 28 Apr 06

Windows Frotz 1.09

Windows Frotz 2002 has a new name and a new version: Windows Frotz 1.09. The new version now supports the iFiction metadata as per the Treaty of Babel (more about that in a moment), and thus can now display a game's cover art and information about the game.

Treaty of Babel

Works of interactive fiction have lacked a metadata standard—bibliographic information about a game. TADS introduced the Game Information format for its games back in 2001, but that was it. To find out a game's author or title, you typically had to run the game.

The Treaty of Babel seeks to change that. The Treaty defines the iFiction metadata format. The format will allow interpreters to provide information about a game without loading the full game. It will also allow for the creation of tools to catalog and browse games in e.g. an iTunes-like approach. Inform, TADS, Hugo and ADRIFT will produce iFiction data from now on forward. And speaking as one of the people who on occasion sorts and files games for the Interactive Fiction Archive, this hasn't come too soon.

Blorbalize

Given the sudden surge of interest in IF metadata and Blorb-packaged z-code games, L. Ross Raszewski has written Blorbalize, a tool for dissecting blorb files and returning information about them. Blorb files are a way of packaging interactive fiction and their resource files, such as graphics and sound files, together. Blorbalize is available as source code or as a Windows binary.

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