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"Mistakes" I wish I had not made

13 years ago
I love this website and the tools it provides. But.... by its very nature it is not forgiving in some respects. For example, after they are entered, pages from one chapter cannot be moved to another or used to create a new chapter. My story has grown like topsy and the logical organization I envisioned still works, but I wish I had created more tight chapters. By "tight" I mean pages that are closely related. Why? Because scripts allow us to add random information or effects specific to a chapter.

I know the "best" approach is to create a list of pages and their association before entering the story at this website. Sorry, but my brain is not that sophisticated. Yes, I did quite extensive planning before starting, but I couldn't stick to that plan completely and ignore creative impulses. Things are progressing fine and I can work around my current organization, but if I do another, I'm going to be more careful.

How about the rest of you? Have you been stuck with mistakes you can't undue without lopping off too much of what you have created?

Chuck

"Mistakes" I wish I had not made

13 years ago
Copy the text, delete the page, create the page in a different chapter, paste the text. :)

"Mistakes" I wish I had not made

13 years ago
Thanks. Should have been obvious to me. But.... would the links still work? Have my doubts about that. If there were more than a few pages to move, updating the links could be a problem across chapters. And some of my pages have quite a few. Maybe I'm wrong though.

"Mistakes" I wish I had not made

13 years ago
Yeah, you'll have to redo both the links from and the links to the page but unless the page is a real hub, it's not a huge idea. When you put the time that it takes to do something like that (even on a large scale, at most an hour, if you're doing like 30 pages or something and I can't see why you'd ever need to move 30 pages) compared to the time it takes to really create a phenomenal story (dozens of hours) then you can see that it's not a huge deal.

Oh, I just reread it and noticed that you mean that links won't connect because they'll be in another chapter. This is true when you're working with the basic editor or working with the advanced editor without scripting. If you change the link script of all of the links that head to this page to have a @dest## (## being the page ID for the new page in the different chapter) it will work.

With scripting you can use links to any page in the story, not just pages in the same chapter. Let me know if you need more clarification on that (the description I just gave assumes you know scripting well and it's just a reminder, not a tutorial, I'll be happy to provide a tutorial if you need one).

"Mistakes" I wish I had not made

13 years ago
I think I understand your suggestion. I do this when moving from a page in one chapter to a page in another. I'm managing just fine now. Thanks for your offer of a tutorial.

The article "Script Code Reference" has a few items that I don't understand and don't know when they would even be used. I wish there were some code examples for both the Values/Keywords and Script Statements. For example,

Lit_Number = ""{StringChar}* ""

?? I have no idea what that means and cannot find any example or explanation. An offline PDF file with expanded information on Script Code would be nice. A PDF file would allow for some nice formatting of explanations.

"Mistakes" I wish I had not made

13 years ago

For my latest story I will be working on, I will plan, by coming up with the ideas and then writing it all in a scripted sort of manner in a rich text document. Then the story will be done, and I can just copy/paste the text, and add in the links and items. You should probably do the same, if you can.

"Mistakes" I wish I had not made

13 years ago
Yea Leon, I could do what you suggest... but as I go through the story I add links and new pages all the time as I read. Something will occur to me that I want to implement. I could go back to the original file and rewrite and make additions there and then port into the game. I guess I become too focused on speed and too impatient to go back to a text file. Also, when I'm doing this I'm not using a computer that has the file. Thanks for taking the time to make a suggestion.