Here’s a tidbit on the theme of helping to update old IF tools. TLDR: the Gargoyle interpreter project is looking for volunteers to build the app on Windows and Linux, so that they can do a new release. (MacOS is covered.)

The full story:

Gargoyle is a popular IF interpreter. That is, if you want to play an Inform game, or a similar parser-based IF game, you can download a game file and load it up into Gargoyle.

(Yes, it’s more common to play IF in a web browser. But interpreter apps were around long before browser players — that thread runs back to Infocom’s invention of the Z-machine. Many dedicated IF fans prefer using interpreters, either because they like the native app interface or because they want to collect IF game files offline.)

Gargoyle is very flexible. It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux; it supports a variety of IF formats (Z-machine, Glulx, TADS, Alan, Hugo, and more). It was designed to display text in a typographically clean and fluent way, for a modern IF playing experience.

On the negative side, it hasn’t been updated much since 2012. That’s generally been okay! A well-tested app can remain in use for many years. But Gargoyle has run into a few snags. Some of the interpreter engines are out of date. Emily Short’s Counterfeit Monkey overran the app’s UNDO space in an unexpected way. Most seriously, MacOS 10.12 “Sierra” changed the keystroke input behavior in some subtle way which broke the app entirely.

In all these cases, the fixes were simple; contributed patches showed up on Github almost immediately. Problem was, the project was essentially shelved. The original maintainer had moved on. Nobody stood up and said “Okay, we are accepting these patches and doing a new release.”

In IFTF’s discussion of the adoptable IF tech archive, Gargoyle came up repeatedly. Is Gargoyle an abandoned project? No, there’s a mailing list and a Github repository which have some activity. Okay, can I do anything to nudge it?

At this point it sounds like I’m building up to an “I saved Gargoyle!” press release. No, no. Chris Spiegel is the one who stepped up and started organizing a new release. My role was to say, look, I’m involved with this organization which aims to support IF tools. Can we draw attention to this? Can we pass the word along?

And that’s why I’m reposting this.

I’m completely in favor of finding willing volunteers to do builds. I’m not familiar enough with any of the target systems (including specific Linux distributions) to be able to do builds, so I’d welcome anybody with that knowledge to step forward and handle it.

— Chris Spiegel, mailing list message, March 18

Chris is looking for people to do Windows and Linux builds. The last release covered Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu-i386, and Ubuntu-amd64. So we want to cover at least that much, but more would be nice.

(I have volunteered to do MacOS builds; I worked out the procedure a few months back.)

If you’re interested, join the mailing list and let us know. Thanks.