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Twine (Sugarcane) slowing down

I'm writing a story, and there are, I don't know, 50 or so passages so far. Scrolling through the map is getting choppy. Looks like a memory issue, but come on, I have an adequate laptop.

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  • temnix wrote:

    I'm writing a story, and there are, I don't know, 50 or so passages so far. Scrolling through the map is getting choppy. Looks like a memory issue, but come on, I have an adequate laptop.

    You don't state which version of Twine 1.x you are using.

    Are there a lot of interconnecting links between the 50+ passages, because re-calculating and re-drawing the links on the passage map can slow things down.
    Does your story contain embedded images? because rendering the images on the passage map can also slow things down.
  • Only one image, but yes, lots of links. How could it not have them?

    Anyway, I'm shutting that story down, but thanks.
  • I have a large project which has slowed practically to a stop when scrolling around. It might take up to a minute to redraw every time I shift the map. But I'm probably three-quarters done with it, so I'm just working with it, trying to be patient. I've got over 650 passages, nearly 550 links, and almost 300 variables, although quite a few of those are arrays. It still runs just fine, the map is just sloooowww, and editing is a little laggy too.

    I just wish there were a way to turn off the link lines, as I don't really need them and they just slow it down immensely. Anybody have a hack or patch for that?
  • Twine 1 story formats support a special passage named StoryIncludes which allows an Author to break up a story containing a large number of passages over multiple story TWS files.

    You end up with a parent TWS file which you use to build your story HTML file from, which contains a StoryIncludes special passage that references your child story TWS files. By doing this each individual story TWS file contains less passages so it preforms better, especially if you place passages that are linked to by many other passages within a child file.

    An example StoryIncludes passage:
    character_descriptions.tws
    hub_locations.tws
    chapter1.tws
    chapter2.tws
    
  • If experiencing slow-downs, one might try clicking on Edit, then Preferences. There are some check boxes meant to help. Might shave some time off.
  • Sharpe wrote: »
    If experiencing slow-downs, one might try clicking on Edit, then Preferences. There are some check boxes meant to help. Might shave some time off.

    Oh thanks, I didn't even see those options. Yay, so I can hide the connector arrows for special kinds of passages like images, stylesheets, and displayed passages, but why can't I just hide *ALL* the connector arrows? I don't need them, really, and probably 90% of the connections are between normal passages. I'm sure it would help a lot to hide them all.
    Twine 1 story formats support a special passage named StoryIncludes which allows an Author to break up a story containing a large number of passages over multiple story TWS files.

    Thanks for the suggestion to break up the project. I'll consider it, but I'm so far into this project now that it would be a lot of work to decide which passages to transfer to a different file. My passage organization by section number vs the "chapter" or "plot" organization doesn't lend itself well to that, since it's a gamebook with plot threads jumping all over the book at times. I'll definitely keep that in mind for future projects, though.
  • Just wanted to drop in to vehemently support splitting up the story. I'm working with 2000+ passages at the moment and found out that breaking it down into logical units (in my case: UI in one part, base logic in another, story content broken down into chapters, with display logic in one part and text snippets in another, organized per chapter) is the way to go.

    It still slows down (text files with 150+ passages get choppy) but it's managable this way. Putting it all in one file would slow the system to a crawl (one of my earlier stories used this) and I found it all but impossible to work with.

    Obviously you won't want to re-organize an entire story (though copying files and deleting passages has helped me when I had to break down large chunks in the past) but if you ever start on a new project, keep this in mind as you design the system. You'll have to get used to jumping between twine files and figuring out where what is (annoying for editing) but overall it's well worth the effort.

    You can also re-use the various files as modules across projects, which helps with re-usable code. It isn't a perfect solution but it adds a great deal of flexibility to the already flexible twine framework.
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