How do I find interesting errors to use on purpose?

Question

Hello wonderful people!

(Using SugarCube 2.21)

I thought it would be fun in a scene where you "die" to deliberately insert things (using <<timed>> delays) that cause error messages. But I only know of a few errors I can prompt, like "that passage does not exist" or "that audio track does not exist", and I was wondering if anyone knows of more, and how they would be prompted.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use the throwError() function to throw custom errors to your heart's content.

@@#error;@@

<<script>>
    postdisplay['error'] = function (t) {
        delete postdisplay[t];
        throwError('#error', 'No player character.', 'You appear to be kind of mostly dead.  Sorry you had to find out like this.');
    }
<</script>>

Note that because the error message needs to target something on the DOM, you need to wait for the rendering to finish before you can do it.  A postdisplay task (as above) works, but so would a passage event, a link/button, or even a <<timed>> macro.

Note: This is an undocumented function, so it's not officially supported, and could change, be removed, be made unavailable, etc in future SugarCube versions. 

Comments

This is exactly more than I had hoped for! How would you format it for the <<timed>> macro?

---

This would work:

<<nobr>>@@#error;@@<<timed 3s>>
<<run throwError('#error', 'No player character.', 'You appear to be kind of mostly dead.  Sorry you had to find out like this.')>>
<</timed>><</nobr>>

That will display the error after three seconds.  See the <<timed>> macro for details.

---

Thank you guys! It worked like a charm!

Here is the finished product:

VValkabout

It is a proof of concept for making 3D environments in Twine.