The Limitations of the Engine

Kormack

Greetings. I just started using Twine and I am really enjoying it so far. It is an excellent and polished tool.

Before I sink any significant time into making a story with this engine though I was wondering about some of the limits of the engine. Is there a limit on the number of passages a story can have? I did some research and found some posts about the length of the URL being a maximum of around 2,000 characters and I know that the URL is used to save the path that the reader chooses through the story. I am afraid that this would limit the number of passages (and passage links) I would be able to put in a story. Is there a way of not using the URL to save the reader's progress through the story? I think I've seen some Twine story somewhere where the URL did not change as I moved through the story. I am trying to find that story, I think it was a tutorial or example story somewhere.

I looked all around the old Google group, the wiki, and this forum before posting so I hope that I have not posted a question easily answered by some resource I have missed. Any help would be great.

mth

I think the story format is responsible for handling the story state. If you plan to write a large game, have a look at SugarCube, since that doesn't store state in the URL field and includes a nice save game system.

Kormack

I have seen a few posts and things about SugarCube. I will go and check it out. Thanks. The story I plan will have at least a few hundred passages. Does SugarCube have any limitations on the number of passages?

Sharpe

I ran a story (in the default Sugarcane) with more than 250 passages and didn't come close to any sort of limitation, I doubt. Just FYI.

If 2000 characters is the limit of a URL, you would have to actually visit close to that many passages for it to run into that limit, of course.

However, SugarCube is very popular and comes highly recommended anyway.

L

Kormack wrote:

Before I sink any significant time into making a story with this engine though I was wondering about some of the limits of the engine. Is there a limit on the number of passages a story can have? I did some research and found some posts about the length of the URL being a maximum of around 2,000 characters

Based on two minutes of searching, it seems this specific limit only exists in IE 7 and below, which Twine officially does not support. Chrome and Firefox apparently have a "limit" of 65,535 (they might support beyond this, but may not).

Just to be clear: I changed the URL scheme in 1.4. In addition to saving the passages, it also saves all the story's variables, using base64 encoding. This is so that user-inputted data (like with <<textinput>>) will work with URL saving. But, I added some things like visited() that can be used instead of variables for a number of very simple cases, so for most people this won't be a problem.