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What is the Story Includes Feature?
Hello. I would like to try to create a very long story that includes a ton of passages, links, audio clips and images. I'm afraid that such a story would be too big for Twine. So I googled "Twine story size limit" and found a post from last March.
I found this message from GreyElf: "As a story writer the issue you will encounter if your planning to create a large story/game with the Twine GUI is not file size but the number of Passages / Links within a single TWS file.
Because of the way the Twine GUI determines which passages are current visible and what link arrow lines need to be drawn, the more Passages/links you have within a single TWS file the slower the screen refreshes and the slower the application responds.
So if you are planing on having a lot of Passages/Links in your story/game, especially if you have a link (like one to the players description) that appears in (almost) every Passage, then I suggest to look into using the StoryIncludes feature."
This makes me think that I would need to use StoryIncludes in order to make my story work. I tried googling "Twine StoryIncludes feature" and similar searches, but couldn't find anything. Could someone please link to a description of how to use this feature to get around story size limits?
On a related note, is one story format better than another when it comes to working with large stories?
Thank You.
I found this message from GreyElf: "As a story writer the issue you will encounter if your planning to create a large story/game with the Twine GUI is not file size but the number of Passages / Links within a single TWS file.
Because of the way the Twine GUI determines which passages are current visible and what link arrow lines need to be drawn, the more Passages/links you have within a single TWS file the slower the screen refreshes and the slower the application responds.
So if you are planing on having a lot of Passages/Links in your story/game, especially if you have a link (like one to the players description) that appears in (almost) every Passage, then I suggest to look into using the StoryIncludes feature."
This makes me think that I would need to use StoryIncludes in order to make my story work. I tried googling "Twine StoryIncludes feature" and similar searches, but couldn't find anything. Could someone please link to a description of how to use this feature to get around story size limits?
On a related note, is one story format better than another when it comes to working with large stories?
Thank You.
Comments
I think they're referring to the process of actually writing the story and the twine internal GUI, not the external website. The slowdown they talk of is the Twine internal writing editor.
Because ultimately, even if you use story includes in Twine 1.4, it still outputs it to a single html file, so the speed for people actually playing the game isn't dependent on number of passages but rather what's going on in the passage currently displayed on screen.
If you want to have a huge story I think the best way to get round any GUI issues is to use an external text editor to write the story in. That's why I wrote the SugarCube Notepad++ Language so I don't have to deal with Twine's GUI.
Also, for truly huge stories you may need to increase your browser's memory limit. The amount of data Twine 2 can store is dependent on that.
As @Claretta has suggested that post was in relation to the Twine 1.x application and things that can effect the drawing / scrolling of it's Passage Map. Only time will tell if similar issues will effect the Passage Map of the Twine 2.x application, though the fact that the embedding of image files within a story project is not supported removes one of the main causes.
As far as I am aware Twine 2 does not support sub-projects (main use of StoryIncludes) and I have not seen anything saying it will in the short term, though the only people who would really know the answer to this is @klembot and the other Twine 2 developers.
Unlike Twine 1.x, which stored a story project's data within an external TWS file, a Twine 2.x story project is stored within your web-browser's local storage.
As @Claretta stated, the thing that controls the maximum size your story project can be is the local storage setting of your web-browser.
I don't believe so but someone else may have a different answer.
To Claretta,
Can you still use audio clips in Harlowe?
Does SugarCube just let you use audio while taking up less space, or does it have some other interesting capabilities?
As @Claretta stated you can either use a HTML audio tag or as talked about in this thread you can also use Javascript to play sound. That particular post includes two examples, one using manually written code and the other using a basic Music class.
Space is saved within the generated story HTML file by SugarCube (and Harlowe) by using external stored image / sound files.