Introduction

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When Kevin and Peter needed an easy-to-use hints system for their Interactive Fiction games, their choices were limited. Initial attempts to develop an elaborate system of nudges and winks were abandoned in favor of a software-based approach. The requirements were that it should be easy to use, run on as many platforms as possible (including PDAs), and not require much additional software installation. They also didn't want to have to do a lot of repetitive work for each new game they released. They opted for a browser-based approach, and HintOla was born.

HintOla is a small command line utility program that reads a "raw" text file and produces an html hints document that is viewable in a web browser. Examples of the hints pages it produces are available on the Flavorplex support site. HintOla was also used to generate hints for the excellent graphical adventure games, Nick Bounty: A Case of the Crabs and Nick Bounty: The Goat in the Grey Fedora.

In addition to generating hints for games, HintOla has been used (with varying degrees of success) to provide sample tests for online training and education, and to generate web-based "choose your own adventure" games.

HintOla hints files should work with any modern web browser. No additional software is required to use a HintOla-generated hints page. In our tests, HintOla hints pages worked with recent versions of every browser we could find for Windows, MacOS, Linux, *BSD, Solaris, PalmOS and PocketPC.

Requirements, Installation, and Usage

HintOla requires Perl. Users of Unix-like systems (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, MacOS X, etc) almost certainly already have Perl installed. Windows users can get a free copy here.

To download HintOla as well as some sample input and output files, follow this link.

Using HintOla is easy! Just create a "raw" hints file using any text editing program that can produce plain text files (wordpad, vi, emacs, WordStar, etc.). You can use the sample.raw file as an example. Then run HintOla using your raw file as input, and a hints page will be created.

For practice, you can use HintOla to generate a hints page from the the sample file with the following command:

The output of this command is a new hints file named sample.html. You can get a look at it here. It also contains a brief description of how to write your own "raw" hints file for use with HintOla.