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Twine 1.4 vs Twine 2?

Twine 2 brought a lot of changes, but I've observed that a lot of people are still using Twine 1.4.

I'm looking for some insight on the global opinion. If you're still on Twine 1.4, why? And if you've changed to Twine 2, what convinced you?

(Context behind this question: I'm going to be writing about Twine 2 in the near future, and I'd like to get an idea of how much Twine 2 has or hasn't affected the Twine community.)

Comments

  • edited August 2015
    I use Twine 1.4 because of the ease of editing the html structure, e.g. putting permanent divs in the body section and including libraries in the header. My story uses a lot of different div layers to transition backgrounds and sprites in and out. You can see these graphics effects in this preview video here, like how the background comes in first then the adviser fades in after:



    There are 4 different layers being used to create that effect. (If I sound proud it's because I spent months designing and debugging that system. :p )

    That's impossible in Twine 2 without using Javascript, and I hate using Javascript for creating permanent divs which should properly be done via editing structural html (probably no different, just makes me feel icky to do so).

    Some of those effects also use Greensock Animation (like the "Day 1" layer), and Twine 2 cannot use Greensock in testing until you publish, because again you can't edit the html structure directly to include external javascript libraries. You can, of course, edit it in once you publish, but that's a horrible workflow. Twine 2 doesn't let you alter the html until after you've published, whereas in Twine 1.4 you just open up the targets directory in the Twine 1.4 installation folder, adjust the base html file, and those divs will be there forever.

    And I also like the text tools in 1.4, like it has an actual find and replace function. Really super useful for my story since a lot is powered by code that needs just slight alterations for different events.

    And full page passage view. And last time I used Twine 2, the passage editor started to lag badly once you got passages over a certain length. Creating what is essentially a visual novel, my css is long, and Twine 2 was super frustrating in its tiny, somewhat laggy passage editor.
  • I haven't used twine before, and I spent a solid week trying to learn Twine 2 only to be completely befuddled by a seemingly simple operation. All I wanted to do was have a player click a link, and the act of clicking that link would set/change a variable. There are some great examples of how to do this with Sugarcube, but Twine 2 wasn't reading it properly and would output a broken passage. I tried multiple formats and asked questions all over the place only to find out this is a bug with the twine 2 editor and not any of the formats. It's been a bug since *January* and is apparently not a high priority to get fixed. Yet it seems like core functionality to me.

    So I went to 1.4 and I'm *so* much happier with this version. There is way more and way better documentation and there are no show-stopping bugs like with 2.0 I highly recommend using Sugarcube 1.x on twine 1.4. 1.4 hasn't been updated since last year (because it's stable) but the different formats have been updated recently (sugarcube was updated less than 2 weeks ago).

    Sugarcube has great documentation: http://www.motoslave.net/sugarcube/1/ (for installation help: http://twinery.org/wiki/frequently_asked_questions?s[]=sugarcube#how_do_i_install_sugarcube)
  • Bridger wrote: »
    ... 1.4 hasn't been updated since last year (because it's stable)...
    A small clarification.

    While it is correct that 1.4.2 is the latest released version of the Twine 1 application, there have been a number of updates/fixes to the project source code since that release was created, some as recent as June, but for some reason the developer(s) in charge of the Twine 1 project have chosen not to create a new version of the Twine 1 application.
    It is possible if someone knows/learns a little bit about using Python and GitHub for them to create their own up to date local copy of the Twine 1 application from the project's source code.
  • Thank you all for the insight! I really appreciate it.

    (If anyone else has more to add, I would be happy to hear from you, either here or via email - carolyn at sibylmoon.com.)
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