Blorb is a

package format A package format is a type of archive containing computer programs and additional metadata needed by package managers. While the archive file format itself may be unchanged, package formats bear additional metadata, such as a manifest file or cert ...

for interactive fiction games. Many such games incorporate resources such as

sound effect A sound effect (or audio effect) is an artificially created or enhanced sound, or sound process used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media. Traditi ...

s, music, or pictures. Blorb's purpose is to bind these together into one file. The format was devised by

Andrew Plotkin Andrew Plotkin (born May 15, 1970), also known as Zarf, is a central figure in the modern interactive fiction (IF) community. Having both written a number of award-winning games and developed a range of new file formats, interpreters, and other u ...

and is used in both the

Z-machine The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code f ...

and

Glulx Glulx is a 32-bit portable virtual machine intended for writing and playing interactive fiction. It was designed by Andrew Plotkin to relieve some of the restrictions in the venerable Z-machine format. For example, the Z-machine provides native ...

virtual machines, as well as by the Glk library.

Concept

In the days when games were distributed only on disk, there was no problem in associating a game with its resources: the resources were simply shipped on the same disk. Since all

games were produced by

Infocom Infocom was an American software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced a business application, a relational database called ''Cornerstone (software), Cornerstone''. ...

, there was also no chance that resources would be shipped in a format which a user's interpreter program could not handle. Blorb is needed because neither of these assumptions hold true in modern times: games are typically downloaded as single files, and a user may be using any of a large number of interpreters. A Blorb file may optionally include the

executable In computing, executable code, an executable file, or an executable program, sometimes simply referred to as an executable or binary, causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instructions", as opposed to a data fil ...

code of the game itself. This allows authors of modern games to ship one file containing everything needed to play the game, while also allowing the creation of resource files for classic Infocom games without running the risk of copyright infringement by distributing Infocom's

executable code.

games are almost always shipped in the Blorb format. A rather smaller proportion of

games make use of it, since Z-machine games often rely only on text, and so have no need for the extra resources. As of 2004 Blorb files are supported by all Glk interactive fiction

interpreters Interpreting is a translational activity in which one produces a first and final target-language output on the basis of a one-time exposure to an expression in a source language. The most common two modes of interpreting are simultaneous inter ...

, including

Nitfol The Z-machine is a virtual machine that was developed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank in 1979 and used by Infocom for its text adventure games. Infocom compiled game code to files containing Z-machine instructions (called story files or Z-code f ...

and

Glulxe Glulx is a 32-bit portable virtual machine intended for writing and playing interactive fiction. It was designed by Andrew Plotkin to relieve some of the restrictions in the venerable Z-machine format. For example, the Z-machine provides native ...

. The Blorb format continues the tradition of naming interactive fiction tools after spells in

's '' Enchanter'' trilogy. ''Blorb'' was a spell to bind objects into boxes. Blorb is an

IFF In logic and related fields such as mathematics and philosophy, "if and only if" (shortened as "iff") is a biconditional logical connective between statements, where either both statements are true or both are false. The connective is bicond ...

format, with FORM IFRS. The MIME type commonly in use is "application/x-blorb", and the filename extension is ".blorb", or, for systems where filename extensions are limited to three characters, ".blb". Blorb files containing Z-code games may be named with the extension ".zblorb" or ".zlb"; or, for Glulx games, ".gblorb" or ".glb". These alternative extensions are intended to make it easier for interpreters to ascertain the type of game contained inside.

Formats supported in Blorb files

* Images: PNG and JPEG * Sound: AIFF,

Ogg Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjun ...

* Music: MOD

References

External links

Blorb specification

Graham Nelson's page of Blorb resources
(Warning: the demo game ''The Spy Who Came In From The Garden'' on this page is actually an invalid Blorb file.)

Archive formats {{videogame-software-stub