Showing a link between passages in storyboard without actually creating a clickable link?

rjungemann

Good evening,

I'm using JavaScript to move from passage to passage, but I'd like to be able to show links in the storyboard without them showing up in the passage. Right now I'm doing a workaround like:

This is a random passage. <Destinations>[[one]] [[two]] [[three]]</Destinations>

And then I have some CSS like:

Destinations { display: none; }

I'm wondering if there is possibly a more elegant way? I started digging into the Snowman source code a bit.

Also, as an aside, I've been having very good luck using custom tags and then matching them with JQuery and replacing them with richer "components".

greyelf

In this case the Story Format has little influence on your issue.

The functionality of a Story Project's Passage Map is controlled by the Twine 2 application's source code, and as far as I know it currently has no way for either a Story Author or a Story Format Developer to control how it determines what is a valid link to a passage** nor a way to create custom connection lines between Passages.

** This is why Twine 2 currently only supports the basic markup based link common to all three of the supplied Story Formats.

GoblinSpaceWizard

You can actually put links inside comments, and Twine will think they're links for the purpose of the storyboard. HTML comments <!-- --> or whatever comment format your story format uses should work.

<!-- Fake link -->

greyelf

GoblinSpaceWizard wrote: »

You can actually put links inside comments, and Twine will think they're links for the purpose of the storyboard.

This behaviour may be a possible unintentional side effect of the current implementation of the application's link discovering parser. I have created issue 388 to determine if story Authors can rely on this behaviour in the future.

storymasterq

Unintentional?! I've always done what @GoblinSpaceWizard suggests above.

It better be reliable or I'm switching back to writing on paper, putting them on a cork board, and connecting them with string.

(not really, no)

greyelf

storymasterq wrote: »

Unintentional

The Twine 2 application's documentation makes no mention of this behaviour nor does it's source code, which is why I stated it may be unintentional and that it could be just a side-effect of an overly aggressive regex parser match.

Just because an undocumented feature works a particular way doesn't mean the developer meant it to or even that they knew said feature existed, this is a common way for unknown bugs to be discovered.

It is common for the contents of a comment to be total ignored by a development environment, unless that environment actively states otherwise. This is why I created an issue on the project's web-site so that we can get an advisory from the developers.

TheMadExile

None of the Twine 2 link parser implementations to date consider anything other than the DSB links themselves—that they may be embedded within other markup isn't even considered. That's simply how the code is, and has been, written.