Glossary
Prerequisite: none — this page exists so you can arrive in the middle.
DreamFactory named things its own way, and this port kept those names rather than inventing better ones: a prop file is a "shop", a positional ambient sound is a "cricket". A few more terms are the port's own. Every entry here is one sentence and a link to where it is explained properly.
If you are reading start to finish, you don't need this page — How the game works introduces the important words in order. It's for the reader who landed on savegame.md from a search and hit the word "flat".
The world on screen
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Set | One room or section of the ship — the Lounge, cabin B59 — stored as one file. → SET |
| Scene | A standpoint inside a set: a spot the player can stand on. → the hierarchy |
| View | One direction you can face from a scene. A scene has several, plus the frames between them. → SET |
| Turn ring | The sequence of in-between frames that animates rotating in place, from one view round to the next. → SET |
| Road | A walking animation carrying you from one scene to the next, arriving at a defined facing. The game's own word is transition. → Roads |
| Hotspot | A clickable rectangle attached to a view — the doorway, the painting. → Hotspots |
| Prop | A movable image drawn over the current view: a door, a teacup, a button. → SHP |
| Shop | DreamFactory's name for a file of props (.SHP), organised as groups → states → frames. Nothing to do with shopping. → SHP |
| Actor | A character sprite standing or walking in the room, drawn from a CST file. → Actors |
| Star / actor mark | A named world-point in a SET's actor table where an actor can be placed. → Actors |
| Z layer | The hidden depth image shipped alongside a background, recording how far away each pixel is — which is how a character gets hidden behind a chair. → the Z layer |
| Flat | One full-screen 512×384 screen inside a stage file, with its own scripts and click regions. → Flats |
| Stage | An .STG file: the deck map, the inventory, the UI band, the mini-games. Holds one or more flats. → STG |
| Overlay | A flat pushed on top of another rather than replacing it — how the inventory opens over what's behind it. → the overlay stack |
| UI band | The strip below the picture holding the menu button, your held item and the watch. The view fills 512×264 of a 512×384 screen; the band is the rest. → the UI band |
Characters and conversation
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Puppet | A character's brains — a .PUP file: dialogue, voice lines, and the facial animation for a conversation close-up. → PUP |
| Cast | A character's body — a .CST file of sprites for walking around the world. → CST |
| Stance | A puppet's facial state, assembled from up to 11 layers of frames. → Stances |
| Pose | A cast member's sprite set for one activity (stand, walk), stored as steps × 8 directions. → CST |
| Bevel | A labelled plaque you click to choose a reply in a conversation. Routes name them by the id the PUP script switches on. → Puppets |
The files
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| DFile | The one container format every DreamFactory data file uses — a 1024-byte header, a position table, and numbered containers. → the container format |
| Container | One numbered "drawer" inside a DFile, holding a palette, an image, a script or a chunk of audio. Which index holds what is convention per format. → a single container |
| Gap | A reserved container index with nothing in it, kept so that later indices don't shift. → the position table |
| Pascal string | Text stored as a length byte followed by that many characters, with no terminator — often inside a larger fixed-size field. → Pascal strings |
| BOOTFILE | The script bundle that starts the game and acts as its shared standard library — how doors work, how you move, how the menu behaves. → BOOTFILE |
| Bank | An audio file (.TRK, .SFX, .11K) holding an ordered looping theme plus named one-shots. → Banks |
| Chunk | One sound inside a bank — itself split across several containers, because audio is the format that doesn't fit one drawer. → Audio |
| Code page | Which character encoding the game's text is in. No DF file declares it; it has to be inferred per language tree. → the code page |
| Tree | One gamefiles/ directory per language, each a full copy of the data. A bare filename resolves through a disc selector and a language selector. → two selectors |
Scripts and events
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Handler | A named block in a script that runs when an event fires — openset, mousedown, keydown. → the event model |
| The chain | The ordered list of objects an event is offered to, innermost first, until one consumes it. → the chain |
exitcode / consumed | A handler calling exitcode stops the event travelling further — but only a handler of the event under dispatch counts. → the chain |
passcode | The opposite: hand the event on, so the engine's own default behaviour still runs. → the chain |
| Builtin | A command implemented by the engine rather than in script — about 250 of them, plus 22 sendto* special forms. → the builtin reference |
| Mission / phase | The two globals that encode where you are in the plot. Nearly the whole story is a state machine over these. → the mission flow |
| Guard | The if in front of a story beat, deciding whether it can fire yet. The vocabulary of guards turns out to be small. → the guard vocabulary |
Time and sound
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Heartbeat | The engine's service pass, which fires due timers and advances the clock. → two time bases |
makeloop | The game's timer: a one-shot that re-arms itself, not a loop in the usual sense. → makeloop |
| Cricket | A sound with a position in the room, panned and attenuated by where you're standing. Named for the ambient insect noise it was first used for. → Crickets |
| Walk | An actor moving between marks over time, as opposed to the player's own road animation. → Walks |
| Sink | Where audio actually goes — a real output in the browser, a recorder in tests. → Sinks |
This port's own vocabulary
These aren't DreamFactory words; they're names for parts of this project.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Host | Everything under src/ that is neither format knowledge (src/df/) nor recovered engine behaviour (src/engine/) — the page, the canvas, input, the dev toolbar. → the browser host |
| GameSession | The object that survives a set change: globals, inventory, the interpreter's state. → the GameSession |
| Trace | A snapshot of every script global, the current room and who owns what, taken at a story beat. → the playthrough |
| Golden | A recorded trace a later run is diffed against. → what a golden speaks for |
| Segment | One stretch of the playthrough route — 29 of them cover the boot to the ending. → the playthrough |
| Carried / loaded | Whether a segment continued the live game or resumed a .ti checkpoint. The two produce different traces, which is why a golden only speaks for one. → one game carried |
| Editor | One of seven browser pages that opens a container format with the engine's own reader, lets you change what's safe, and exports the repacked file. → the browser editors |
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