thiloplanz / glulx-typescript

Glulx VM in TypeScript with Channel IO
14 stars 10 forks source link

Glulx VM in TypeScript with Channel IO (work in progess)

Glulx is a specification for a 32-bit virtual machine that runs Inform 6 and Inform 7 story files.

This project is an attempt to implement Glulx in TypeScript.

It is based heavily on the FyreVM (a C# implementation). In particular, it also makes use of the contextual Channel IO layer introduced in FyreVM.

Playing a game image

If you have a Glulx game image (a .ulx file), you can try if it works... this is all still very much under construction, games that target FyreVM work best, Inform6-compiled Glulx games seem to work okay, Inform7 not so much.

in your terminal

You can compile a simple Node.js and readline based command line tool.

$ cd examples/node
$ tsc
$ node runGameImage.js yourGameImageFile.ulx

Note that no command line arguments are required for tsc. All compiler configuration is contained in tsconfig.json. If you are actively editing the files, you may want to add a -w ("watch") flag to the command, though, to have it recompile when the files are updated.

in your browser (simple)

There is a simple HTML page that can load and run a game image. You need to load it through a web server (even though all files are local, no Internet connection required). The easiest way to do that is to npm install -g http-server and use that to serve the page:

$ cd examples/web
$ tsc
$ http-server
$ open http://127.0.0.1:8080/webworker.html

Select a game image (ULX file) from your local file system to press START.

in your browser (using Angular2)

We also have some example code that shows how to integrate the game engine in an Angular2 application.

Running unit tests

There are some unit tests for core engine functionality that you can run on Node.js or in a browser.

using nodeunit

You need Node.js and nodeunit installed (as well as a TypeScript 1.8 compiler).

Then you can compile everything in this project and run the test suite:

$ cd test/node
$ tsc  
$ nodeunit tests.js 

in the browser

You can also run the same unit tests in your browser instead of on Node.js:

$ cd test/web
$ tsc
$ open test.html