http://ift.tt/2eirmCO
Jim Munroe, author of this year’s entry Black Rock City, brought to my attention an issue affecting his game in the specific case of clicking its individual “Download” button from the ballot page. Meaningless groups of characters (such as ) would appear prominently on the screen under certain circumstances, and the intentional text suffered other display issues not present in the game’s online-play or full-archive-download copies.
Investigation revealed two things: at least one other game this year had similar issues, and this was all due to a bug that has been present in the current IFComp web application software since its rollout in 2014. Its fix was relatively simple, and had everything to do with the devilish detail of modern software engineering known as text encoding. Setting an internal specification that all downloaded files must adhere to the flexible encoding standard known as UTF-8 made everything work much better.
So, a message to judges: If you played a game by its individual download link only to find the text riddled with garbage characters or suffering other bizarre legibility issues, I would ask you to download a fresh copy and try it again at your own convenience.
And to authors, my unironic appreciation on writing more games that include text symbols other than ASCII alphanumerics, forcing this issue to light! This has been a very subtle flaw in the system that took more than two years to even notice, and better to repair it now than for it stay hidden for even longer.
Gamebook blogs
http://ift.tt/2eirmCO
via Planet Interactive Fiction http://planet-if.com/
October 22, 2016 at 11:28AM
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