2. perlBlorb now updated to 1.03, correcting the misspelling of the IFhd chunk, and generally tidied up (with better error messages, for instance). One of the The Spy... blorb files is also updated, to spell IFhd correctly, and so is scanBlorb, ditto.
(29.1.98): 1. Andrew Plotkin has created a page formally specifying Blorb: A Z-Machine Resource Collection Format Standard, and is working on some generic C code to unload Blorb files, which may prove useful to interpreter-writers.
2. Jason Penney also has a Blorb page, containing Blorb files for the four graphical Infocom games (Zork Zero, Journey, Shogun and Arthur).
3. perlBlorb 1.02 now fixes a misunderstanding about the inclusion of AIFF chunks, with Blorb files for The Spy... recreated accordingly, and also works on Windows/DOS machines, whose Perl implementations distinguish binary from text files.
4. scanBlorb, a minimal Blorb-file scanner, has been added below. It's probably useful only for testing purposes.
Z-code story files have the ability to give instructions (to the interpreters playing them) that pictures should be displayed, or that sound effects should be played, but cannot themselves contain the pictures or sounds needed. Instead, they refer to them only by number. Pictures are given numbers of 1 and above (not necessarily contiguously), sounds are given numbers of 3 and above.
Infocom's method of supplying pictures and sounds to go with a given story file is not at all convenient for authors today, and cannot cope with advances in computer graphics since the late 1980s. Thus a new method is needed.
"Blorb" is a format, devised by Andrew Plotkin, which embeds all needed resources for a given story into one single "blorb file". Indeed, it can even (optionally) include the story file itself, so that one single file can contain all the Z-code, pictures and sound needed to enjoy the game. The format was debated and agreed after some debate on the Z-machine mailing list. The most significant decisions are that pictures are stored in PNG format and sounds in AIFF format (for samples) or, roughly speaking, SoundTracker files (for music).
The Blorb format contains a number of features for fine tuning, and thus appears to be more complex than it really is. The full specification (latest version 1.0, 24 January 1998) can be found at ftp://ftp.gmd.de/if-archive/infocom/interpreters/specification or from Andrew's URL above.
"Blorb" was the name of a spell in Infocom's game Enchanter whose purpose was to bind objects up into magical boxes.
The format is new and at present no interpreters can play Blorb files, though pressure is building.
However, a program to create Blorb files has just been written. It is at present a Perl script (Perl being an interpreted language for messing about with files, popularly used with the Unix operating system and ported to numerous others). This will probably not be a permanent solution, but may be of use to interpreter-writers as a stopgap, in that it can be used to make test Blorb files. In its present state, the program is called "perlBlorb".
perlBlorb is the interpreter for a very simple programming language called "blurb". It reads in a file of instructions (the "blurb file") and follows these instructions to manufacture a Blorb file, gathering together the scattered image and sound files needed.
Along the way, it prints out a list of Inform constant definitions which may be useful to a game designer working on the story file which goes with the resources in question. In particular, this means that the designer doesn't need to work out how to number the pictures and sounds: perlBlorb does that automatically.
So the process looks like this:
one blurb file
picture files in PNG format ---> one Blorb file
sound files some Inform definitions
an (optional) story file
! Example "blurb" file copyright "Angela M. Horns 1998" release 17 palette 16 bit resolution 600x400 storyfile "games/sherbet.z5" sound creak "sounds/creaking.snd" sound wind "sounds/wind.snd" picture flag "flag.png" scale 3/1 picture pattern "backdrop.png"When run through perlBlorb, this produces the following output:
! perlBlorb 1.0 [executing on 980124 at 15:31.33] ! The blorb spell (safely protect a small object as though in a strong box). Constant SOUND_creak = 3; Constant SOUND_wind = 4; Constant PICTURE_flag = 1; Constant PICTURE_pattern = 2; ! Completed: size 45684 bytes (2 pictures, 2 sounds)Note that this text can be run directly through Inform. If so, a game designer can then simply use assembly language like so:
@sound_effect SOUND_creak 2 128 255;("start playing this effect at about half maximum volume, repeating it indefinitely"). An alternative would be to use a convenient class library, such as "V6Lib" by Jason Penney, to avoid messing about with assembly language.
You're free to specify the numbering yourself, and you need not give names for the pictures and sounds. So a blurb command like:
picture "backdrop.png"gives this image the next picture number (that is, the number which is one more than the previous picture's number, or 1 if it's the first picture in the file). A blurb command like so:
picture 100 "backdrop.png"gives it picture number 100. The only restriction is that pictures must be given in increasing numerical order. (perlBlorb makes this restriction to help prevent accidental duplication of numbers -- it isn't a restriction in the "blorb" format itself.) Similarly with the numbering of sounds.
| [string] | means any text within double-quotes (not containing either double-quote or new-line characters) |
| [number] | a decimal number in the range 0 to 32767 |
| [id] | either nothing at all, or a [number], or a sequence of up to 20 alphanumeric characters or underscores |
| [dim] | screen dimensions: must take the form [number]x[number] |
| [ratio] | a fraction in the form [number]/[number] (0/0 is legal but otherwise numbers must be positive) |
| [colour] | a colour expressed as six hexadecimal digits, as in some of Netscape's HTML tags: for instance F5DEB3 is the colour of wheat, with red value F5 (on a scale 00, none, to FF, full), green value DE and blue value B3. Hexadecimal digits may be given in either upper or lower case. |
release [number]
Gives this release number to the file. (This is the number
returned by the opcode "@picture_data 0" within any game using
the Blorb file, and might be used when printing out version
information.)
palette 16 bit
palette 32 bit
palette { [colour-1] ... [colour-N] }
Blorb allows designers to signal to the interpreter that a
particular colour-scheme is in use. The first two options simply
suggest that the pictures are best displayed using (at least)
16-bit, or 32-bit, colours -- no special palette is in use.
The third option specifies colours used in the pictures
in terms of red/green/blue levels, and the braces allow the
sequence of colours to continue over many lines. At least
one and at most 256 colours may be defined in this way. This is
only a "clue" to the interpreter -- see the Blorb specification
for details.
resolution [dim]
resolution [dim] min [dim]
resolution [dim] max [dim]
resolution [dim] min [dim] max [dim]
Allows the designer to to signal a preferred screen size, in real
pixels, in case the interpreter should have any choice over this.
The minimum and maximum values are the extreme values at which
the designer thinks the game will be playable: they're optional,
the default values being 0x0 and infinity by infinity.
storyfile [string]
storyfile [string] include
Tells perlBlorb the filename of the Z-code story file which these
resources are being provided for. (There is no need to do this
if you prefer not to.)
Usually the Blorb file simply contains a note of the release number,
serial code and checksum of the story file, which an interpreter
can try to match at run-time to see if the Blorb file and story
file go together. If the "include" option is used, however, the
entire story file is embedded within the Blorb file, so that game
and resources are all bound up in one single file.
sound [id] [string]
sound [id] [string] repeat [number]
sound [id] [string] repeat forever
sound [id] [string] music
sound [id] [string] song
Tells perlBlorb to take a sound sample from the named file and
make it the sound effect with the given number. The file should
be an AIFF file unless "music" is specified, in which case it
should be a MOD file (roughly speaking a SoundTracker file); or
unless "song" is specified, in which case it should be a song
file (roughly, a SoundTracker file using other Blorb sound effects
as note samples).
Note that repeat information (the number of repeats to be played) is meaningful only in Blorb files to accompany version 3 games. In all modern games, repetition is under the control of the game file directly, so that this feature of Blorb is provided only to make it possible to enBlorb the sound effects for Infocom's V3 game "The Lurking Horror".
picture [id] [string]
picture [id] [string] scale [ratio]
picture [id] [string] scale min [ratio]
picture [id] [string] scale [ratio] min [ratio]
...etc.
Similarly for pictures: the named file must be a PNG-format image.
Optionally, the designer can specify a scale factor at which the
interpreter will display the image -- or, alternatively, a range
of acceptable scale factors, from which the interpreter may choose
its own scale factor. (The default situation is that an image is
not scaleable and an interpreter must display it pixel-for-pixel.)
There are three optional scale factors given: the preferred scale factor, the minimum and the maximum allowed. The minimum and maximum each default to the preferred value if not given. The default preferred scale factor is 1.
Scale factors are expressed as fractions: so for instance,
picture "flag/png" scale 3/1
means "always display triple size", whereas
picture "backdrop/png" scale min 1/10 max 8/1
means "you can display this anywhere between 1/10th normal size
and eight times normal size, but if possible it ought to be
just its normal size".
Note that:
1. This is a Perl 5 script, though it uses few advanced features of the language and probably works in Perl 4 equally well.
2. It has three filenames wired into it, but all occur in obvious scalar declarations in the first few lines. These need to be changed to something sensible for the host machine. The temporary directory can be anywhere where files can harmlessly be created. (Note that perlBlorb doesn't bother to delete these temporary files at the end of its run.)
3. It's very rudimentary and, in particular, fails to check for several error conditions (say, including two contradictory palette definitions). Caveat downloador.
You can also download scanBlorb, a rudimentary Perl script for parsing and reporting on the contents of a Blorb file, from here.
This very short Version 5 game uses sound effects (AIFF only: no music or song samples) but not graphics, and was written as an easy test case. It has only a simple Blorb file, which I hope will enable interpreter-writers to start work on upgrading to Blorb without the distraction of handling graphics and the intricacies of Version 6. The game prints text like:
[Sound effect 5 should be heard now.]whenever it executes the sound_effect opcode, so it should at least be easy to tell what is supposed to happen. There are five sound effects in the game.
You can download two different versions:
1. A single Blorb file which has the story file included within it.
2. The story file plus a separate Blorb file (which contains a chunk identifying itself as belonging to the story file, but doesn't include the actual Z-code).
This is all very experimental, so it's quite possible that there's some mistake in these Blorb files -- indeed these are the third versions already. Please let me know if you suspect further difficulty.