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klembot / twinejs

Twine, a tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories
https://twinery.org
GNU General Public License v3.0
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suggested feature chapter #707

Open gavinrobertkemp opened 4 years ago

gavinrobertkemp commented 4 years ago

Hello,

I wanted to suggest a feature that could make story making easier. a kind of chapter feature to make complexe stories a bit less of a mess.

The idea is to have within a chapter is to simply minimise into the chapter a bunch of passages that are presumably inter connected. double clicking on the chapter would maximise it content. this would make writing stories a lot easier since we could start classifying story elements rather than having hundreds of passages which become hard to track.

klembot commented 4 years ago

I’ve thought about something similar but a couple usability issues emerge...

That’s not to say it’s impossible to do this but it is trickier than it might first appear.

gavinrobertkemp commented 4 years ago

Hello,

Thank you for you response.

Here are some ideas to how to resolve your questions.

There is a way i've seen in a piece of software called sunlite that might be easyish to do. sunlite in is a lighting software and it offers groupings for effect you want manage as a group, to move the button from one group to another you simply add or change the name of your button so it has the name of the grouping in prefix. something similar could be done or you could have a special chapter tag.

The way I saw it in my head is in birds eye view you see links between chapters and top level passages like you do now. when you go into a chapter a link would go to a box that simply names the passage and the chapter. As an later improvement you could add a feature that will open the chapter when you click on the link but I wouldn't consider this a required feature.

I'd personally start simple so I wouldn't do embedded chapter at the beginning, I think embedded chapter would only have a fairly limited use in my opinion and it opens so many design a usage questions that can only be answered after using a chapter feature.

I think a window opening up like how you do for the text would work nicely. you'll have to be able to the stack a text box on top to modify the text inside.

I think a feature like this even in its simplest form would already be useful and answers to the questions of improvements would come once user start providing feedback on the feature.

greyelf commented 4 years ago

I think a window opening up like how you do for the text would work nicely. you'll have to be able to the stack a text box on top to modify the text inside.

This can become quite messy for those people running smaller sized screens. eg. Tablet users.

A couple of other technical questions.

  1. How would this 'chapter' concept be represented in the HTML elements that are used to store the contents of a Twine 2.x Project within the story meta-data area of a Story HTML file?
  2. How would this same 'chapter' concept be represented within TWEE Notation?
  3. What are the Developers of the Story Formats meant to do with this 'chapter' information at runtime? Will an Author want access to the 'chapter' information from within their story?
gavinrobertkemp commented 4 years ago

fair point about the tablet users, i'll have to think about that maybe a kind of zoom feature them but i'm not sure.

now to give precise answers to your next questions will be tricky since i don't really know how its implemented. for number 3, I wouldn't see chapter being used at run time, they are more a tool to help organise stories just like tags, in fact I'd suggest reserving a word for chapter within the twee and html elements.