Hello!
Now, I know this is a feature that has been suggested and rejected twice over in the forums. Despite this, I would greatly appreciate you all hearing me out for this one.
By story tree, I refer to a two dimensional flow chart of the all the pages and the links between them. For example, take the two images below:
I feel strongly that implementing an automatic story-tree building mechanism, available to the authors during the editing of their works, would be massively advantageous and popular on two main grounds:
With the current tools, pages are listed in the order they are created, as are chapters. This method of organization provides zero indication of the relationships between the pages in a story. With a flow chart, however, it is immediately and intuitively clear exactly which pages link to and from a given page. Every choice is laid out visually in an accessible way, permitting even inexperienced users to create stories of a complexity far beyond what we currently see: The vast majority of the stories here consist entirely of trees where only one page links to a page, and each page leads to only two options. As an example, see the tree of Ground Zero I linked to above. Now, as this example goes to show, incredible pieces can be written this way, but it is exceedingly difficult to make stories that are more complex, when authors have no way to visualize their work.
As Zikara (who provided the image of Ground Zero's story in the previous thread) mentioned, these trees can get big. Really big. And in order to navigate them, zoom and pan tools would be fairly certainly needed. I do not disagree with this, however, I argue that even with having to zoom and scroll around a large graphic depiction, both the overall layout and and fine linking structure of a story would be immeasurably easier to keep organized.
Despite the rejection of this proposal in a previous thread, even a brief scan of said thread makes clear that this idea was massively attractive to a clear majority of commenters, with only one main detractor of the idea of automatic story trees. Several users voiced their enthusiasm for using story trees on their own in the creation of choose-your-own-adventure type pieces, and in writing more generally. I guarantee that similar opinions will be heard wherever writers and story-makes of all media can be found. The reason, as explained before, is obvious: A graphical representation is by far the easiest way to process, understand and manipulate the sort of data we work with here. As a related example, I work with syntax trees extensively in my field. Example: http://westonruter.github.io/svg-tree-drawer/old/sentence.png (not my image). The contents here do not matter, but notice that the relationship between each node on the tree is intuitively clear. You can see exactly which node connects to which other node. The current editor for stories here would represent that syntax tree as something like the following (that is, a list):
C'', what, C', C, is, T'', D'', D'', D', D, the, N'', N', N', boy,.....
You get the idea. There is no way to tell how anything connects to anything else here, and yet this is exactly the interface we use. Even when editing a page, it is difficult to tell which pages link to the page in question. It is very easy to get lost or confused even when working with simple, binary splitting story paths. If we want to create situations with several splits, loops, back linking, etc, lord help us. A tree would make these relationships intuitive. In the previous thread, the difficulty of representing the complexity introduced by scripting was brought up. This is an important point, but I feel that, however they might be represented (with dotted lines/ colors/ off to the side), it is still infinitely easier to keep track of and visualize than in the unorganized lists we have now!
I would be highly surprised if, if such an automatic tree creating interface were implemented, it proved unpopular. In fact, I expect that it would become the editing method of choice, so long as, say, you could click on a page and edit it from there. This is not to say we should do away with the linear representation of pages we have now. Both tools should be available alongside each other. But, I'd venture to bet that most users would quickly migrate.
Here is the link to the other main thread where this was discussed: http://chooseyourstory.com/forums/feature-wishing-well/message/12515
Thanks for your consideration.
