onyxbits / TextFiction

Z-Machine interpreter for Android
https://textfiction.onyxbits.de
Apache License 2.0
71 stars 28 forks source link

Various crashes rendering stories unplayable #31

Open ShadowM00n opened 5 years ago

ShadowM00n commented 5 years ago

Hello,

I've noticed that multiple titles, such as Curses and Janitor, are quick to crash and take the whole program with them. I suspect this is due to unimplemented or broken engine features, as both games function as expected in Frotz and Gargoyle on GNU/Linux as well as Son of Hunky Punk and Fabularium on Android. I should note that I'm using v2.7 from F-Droid, which appears to be the latest tagged version.

In Curses, I suspect the issue to be related to the inform6 "box" command (forces reversed video output in a box overlaid on the top section of the screen), as it crashes instantly or after the first keystroke, and "box" seems to normally be used to display a randomized quote at that point. Alternatively, an apparently common technique for making a staggered intro is to read an otherwise pointless keystroke into an array using @read_char, and that may also be upsetting something, though I'd think that less likely. I notice that Text Fiction lacks colour support in general, though I'm not certain if that ties in, since Photopia, while diminished, works, though given that "box" does apparently manipulate colour a bit I figured I'd mention it.

As for Janitor, it crashes instantly upon loading. Normally, it would be expected to have real-time emulated input typing the word "quit"; I would suspect then that the issue is related to that. Supporting this is that another title, Shrapnel, dies at the same instant and also employs the same trick.

I don't recall seeing a known issues listing anywhere mentioning this, so my apologies if I missed something. Seeing a prior open issue regarding file types, note that all four titles mentioned are z5 files.