Can't post my Demo

@Gunhand4171 It looks like you found a way around the restriction / cost for a dedicated Public folder. Wiki needs updating to suit though - was the method you used something like the process described in the following helpfile?

https://www.dropbox.com/help/167/en

@Vendetta
Lol nope. I sent my file to Cataphrak. He put the file in his public folder and sent me the link. But if will read that helpfile and try it out on my next upload. Sorry that doesn’t help very much.

@Gunhand4171 :frowning: I’m probably just clutching at straws here, in the hope we can find a usable (and free) solution, as I’m far from convinced that the page I linked to is the right kind of file sharing for our purposes… Blah. It would be a sad day indeed if new WIPs have to go back to using something like webs.com.

Has anyone tried the Google facility for file sharing? Does that have a free public folder?

Well that sucks.

@Vendetta
This is what I mean when I say how it’s not ideal to rely on third party services :frowning:

The issue with Google Drive is that (last I checked) due to how the URLs are built, it doesn’t allow sourcing from directories above the requesting file (which CS does).
You could rejiggle the choicescript files and change some tags to make it work, but it’s quite the faff.

One other solution, though still not ideal, might be to upload compiled games.
Once a file is shared on dropbox, you can actually change the crappy “share” links to a direct download link by simply replacing www. with dl., however this will only work on that one file, so it’s a no-go for a normal choicescript directory.
You’ll just get this for any sourced files:

It may however (I haven’t tested it) allow us to get away with hosting single .html files.

EDIT: I just tried it and swapping out the www. on a compiled file outside of the public folder seems to work! My First ChoiceScript Game

Could you explain what you did to get it to work outside the public folder in a bit more depth? I’ll need to take advantage of this at some point soon, haha.

@BrianBlack My thoughts exactly. @CJW Were you talking about dl. instead of www.?

@BrianBlack
@DSeg

  1. First download this version of compile.html:
    Dropbox - compile.html - Simplify your life

EDIT: The currently shipped version of compile.html in recent builds should work fine, there’s no to download the above version unless you’re having problems.

Look in your game’s top directory where the test files and the like are:

Replace the current compile.html with the one you just downloaded (very important!).

  1. Open your new compile.html in Firefox, after a variable amount of time (not too long though) you should see something similar to the following:

  2. As instructed, download the file. That file should be a .html file and it should be a working copy of your game.

  3. Upload this new mygame.html file to dropbox (doesn’t matter where).

  4. Once it’s uploaded you need to obtain the sharing link, the method for which varies slightly depending on whether you do it through dropbox.com or the dropbox application.

  5. Once you have the link (it should look something a little like the one below)
    Dropbox - mygame_complete.html - Simplify your life

Replace “www” with “dl” and “dropbox” with “dropboxusercontent”, like this:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/z06ut7b2z5fbpt5/mygame_complete.html

There you have, did that make sense?
I’m sorry it’s not a bit easier, but it’s the best I can do right now.
I did try and make some changes to the compile file that would allow it to be uploaded to Dropbox and give you the link automatically, but the API doesn’t want to work locally :confused:

11 Likes

@CJW Thanks for the instructions.

@CJW, Thank you for that. I wasn’t quite sure how I would be able to upload future demos, but this seems to do the trick. ^:)^

@CJW, sorry if I’m being dumb here, this is my first post. I’ve just made an account to ask you this. I have a choicescript game I’ve been working on for a long time, and I cannot upload it to dropbox because the public folder was removed. I tried your method, but I cannot download your compile.html folder. The link takes me to a blank, white screen.

I’ve even sent the link to some of my friends, and they can’t download it either. Could you please re-upload it for me? It’s really the only way I’ll be able to host my game online, and I would greatly appreciate it.

As always, I am willing to host CoG wips. But not really setup to do anything like dropbox. @CJW is there a good way we can setup web access for wips on my server?

@Ayzkalyn
As it’s an .html file your browser will try to open it (not download it) by default, so you need to right click the link and select ‘save as…’ from the context menu.
Hope that helps :slight_smile:

@lordirish
Not really, not besides you uploading every game yourself via FTP, but that’s no better for the author than asking someone (with a public folder) to host it for them :confused:

@CJW I thought as much but thought to see if you had a better idea.

Hi,
I’ve got a problem with this.
I generate the .html file which should contain my game, but it doesn’t work.
The file opens, but it shows only the basic windows and loading bar. After this the bar is moving but the game itself doesn’t load.
Any ideas what am I doing wrong? :confused:

@sokol07
Do you know how to activate the browser’s console? Hit F12 when you’re trying to run the compiled game and you’ll get a window pop up at the bottom of your browser.
If you go to the ‘console’ tab and make sure “errors” are shown, there should be more information there. If you could check that and report back, I’ll have more chance of being able to help.

Apart from that, I can only suggest you just try a recompile, and double check that all your scenes are listed correctly under *scene_list.

I tried recompiling, scenes are listed correctly, because the game runs correctly when I run it locally.

In console I’ve got three errors. One isn’t important, I think, because it is an information, that some signs from the font may be displayed with errors (and that’s ok, because I’m writing in Polish).

Other two are:
ReferenceError: \u010F\u0165\u017C is not defined
ReferenceError: isIE is not defined

Edit:
I also found a few warnings from CSS, but if you need them, you must give me time to tomorrow - I have to translate them from Polish.

Actual game runs without problems, compiled doesn’t.
I’ll check the scene list in the afternoon. If I don’t find anything, I’ll send you a link.

Apologies for the bump, but since this thread is mentioned in the wiki (for game publication) I thought I’d best post this here.

I’m pretty sure I found out what was causing your problem @sokol07, in the current version of Choicescript the ui.js file is encoded differently to the other files.
I tried compiling my own game and got the exact same error you had (for the exact same reason).
Changing the encoding of ui.js to ANSI (same as other .js files) seemed to fix it.
You do this via opening the file in Notepad++ and selecting the appropriate menu option before re-saving it and rerunning compile.html.

Better yet, just highlight, delete and retype the first couple of characters in the file, the asterisk and the slash: “/*”.

I’ll update this post as/if/when this is no longer an issue.

Update

There’s still no word on an official fix for either of the bugs affecting the compilation process, but after some tweaking I seem to have managed to circumvent both of them through automatic edits in the compile process itself. This isn’t ideal, but it’s better than nothing.

EDIT: The compile code that ships with the Choicescript-master zip seems to work now. Though I’ll leave this link/version up for anyone who likes the scene list GUI and IE support(?).

In English: Basically try replacing your version of compile.html with this one:

If you do that you *shouldn’t* need to implement any of the fixes mentioned on this page, it should work straight out of the box (please let me know if it doesn’t!).
It also features a sort of experimental GUI thing I wanted to try which lists the scenes that compile can find automatically and then gives you a chance to add any more before clicking compile.

I tried using that to compile my game, but when I put in my scenes and hit compile it gives me two error messages, although they are probably me using internet explorer

  1. Export failed
    could not open web/mygame/index.html

  2. Your browser may not be supported. We recommend using Mozilla Firefox for compile.html

Any help is much appreciated since it is probably just my stupidity with things like this.