Comments on: Twine is Rolled Out

By: Merk

Merk — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 13:56:54 +0000

Regarding http://gimcrackd.com/etc/src/ — In IE6, only the left portion of the page is shown (none of the note blocks on the right — it’s just an empty tan area). I visited twice previously and couldn’t see anything about downloading the game. Thought maybe it wasn’t actually available, or had been taken down or something.

After a third disappointment today, I tried again in FireFox and saw the extra links at the right.

I realize it’s easy to dismiss this as a “bug” in IE6, but it might be worth checking into. I’ve found that most display problems can be solved on the page with minimal effort, and if it’s broken in IE6, the same thing could be happening in older versions of other browsers as well.

By: William Patrick Wend

William Patrick Wend — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:26:24 +0000

Oh, neat, I will definitely try that out. Thanks, Chris.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:52:37 +0000

William — if you can install wxPython and a Subversion client on your box, you should be able to run Twine on Linux by checking out the source code. Here’s the command line to do this with the standard Subversion client:

svn checkout http://twee.googlecode.com/svn/twine/tags/1.0 twee-read-only

From the downloaded folder, run app.py. Feel free to drop me a line if you run into problems.

By: William Patrick Wend

William Patrick Wend — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:38:00 +0000

I’ll try this out for a project I have been outlining lately. Wish it was available for Linux, but I duel boot Ubuntu/XP so that isn’t too big of a problem. I’ll definitely write on my weblog about how things go with Twine.

By: Nick Montfort

Nick Montfort — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:03:17 +0000

Chris, I fixed your original comment … I think?

Yes, the conditional appearance of links is the essence of guard fields, as I understand them.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:00:29 +0000

Argh, WordPress ate where I typed <>. …

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:57:14 +0000

I’m not superfamiliar with guard fields though I’ve read some descriptions of how they work, and I think Twine/twee can do something similar with conditional display. A short, IF-ish example: in one passage you could write,

You pick up the lantern. <>

And then in another, you could write:

You stand in front of the cave mouth.
<>* [[Press forward]]<>
* [[Turn back]]

… so that only if the reader had previously picked up a lantern, would they see a link to enter the cave. Behind the scenes, it’s JavaScript so you can write more complex expressions …