[CSIDE] The ChoiceScript IDE (v1.3.3 Now Available — 05/09/2022)

We all greatly appreciate your work and dedication! CSIDE has pretty much revolutionized how people write their games. I probably wouldn’t even be writing these games if I didn’t have it. Take as much time as you need!

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Oh, agreed! It’s an amazing tool. I couldn’t think of going back to N++.

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Yep! I have almost finished my second story written exclusively in CSIDE and I love it. Fully intend to stick with it for the duration.

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Thanks for the kind words all, it does wonders for motivation :slight_smile:

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Firstly, thank you for CSIDE - just being able to randomtest and quicktest with the tool already makes it amazing for me.
Can I please ask if there is a way to test scenes out of order? For example, at the moment I have nearly finished the first chapter (which would not have been possible without huge help from the help forum btw) . To test the second scene I have to click through the first scene and it is getting old v quickly. The only thing I can do somethimes is change startup so that the scene I want is first, is that what everyone does or am I missing something?

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There is, in a sense similar to what you’re already doing. You can force jump to a certain scene.
You have to think carefully about what you’re testing though. Skipping scenes is usually going to lead to testing the game in a state that the player is never going to be in, making it useless at best, and downright deceiving at worst.

If however, you’re simply wanting to ‘see if things don’t break’, you can do two things:

  • The way you’re doing it now with a forceful *goto_scene
  • Use the ChoiceScript console in CSIDE

I include a gif of the latter, but I’ll leave the explanation to the CSIDE documentation.

GIF

EDIT: In fact, here is the most appropriate quote from said documentation:

Caution When Using *goto: Using *goto commands from the Console can lead to errors that could not exist in a standard play-through of the game. For instance, if you were to *goto a section using a specific variable before visiting the section where that variable is created or defined, the game would then crash. Use *goto and *goto_scene with caution.

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Hi folks,

Got some cool CSIDE news coming up fairly shortly—lots of info on various goodies, some near and some far!

Meanwhile, here’s a little (WIP) mockup I made, trying out a new look to modernise and further streamline CSIDE’s UI:

New

For comparison, here’s the current look!

Current for comparison

Please do comment and let us know what you think! Your thoughts and suggestions are always welcome. CSIDE is what it is because of its users—your invaluable feedback, big and small, is forever appreciated.

Thanks everyone!

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I like the top bar layout! My only question is, where are the scene files? I didn’t see them on the mockup.

I like how you are evolving the UI –

I know that there are little convenience issues that text editors such as Word ++ have that you’ll keep updating into your UI as you can and I thank you for keeping abreast of all that.

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The idea here is to move towards the more traditional code/text editor horizontal tab format (primarily for purposes of reclaiming screen ‘real estate’). The scene tabs are right below the project tabs. Though this is a WIP, so if you missed them, perhaps we need to work on making them a tad more distinct! :sweat_smile:

Thanks for the support Eiwynn! Just right. CSIDE’s been around for quite some time now (especially if you consider its early development years). There’s a lot more to say on this topic and I have some plans I want to share, and I’ll be posting about those very shortly. Please do check back if you’d like to help drive direction of CSIDE in the coming months/years. There’s still plenty of room for improvement! :slight_smile:

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So no more sidebar? :frowning_face:

I really love the sidebar, because it gives you a bird’s-eye-view of your project structure. Tabs can do this to a certain extent, but I find it’s much harder to parse a list presented horizontally rather than vertically.

The sidebar also lets you quickly jump between scenes from different projects, which is useful if you have test builds.

Personally, I find tabbed navigation really frustrating because the more tabs you have the narrower each tab gets, which makes it hard to read the titles or click on a tab without closing it.

I tend to use a lot of scene files and have a small screen, so I’m a bit concerned about navigability issues, like if the scene titles get truncated to the point where I’m staring at a list of tabs titled chap…

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An easy way to combat this would be to make the top bar scroll instead of resizing the tabs. Not a clean solution, to be honest, but it would prevent the issues you listed. There could also be an option to flip between sidebar and top bar, but that depends on whether CJW wasn’t to code that (and if I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t want to do that).

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Continuing the discussion from [CSIDE] The ChoiceScript IDE (New UI Screenshot — 13/06/2019):

I’m with Lan. Liking the left sidebar better. Helps to orientate in scenes way easier than topbar. And even if its scrollable dunno. For example in work I have to deal a lot with code (not a programmer thou just IT) and notepad++ topbar for files is annoying in sense. If you have many open files it gets very messy. Full name of file is not displayed like its on left side here.

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I think that’s also probably something easy to work around given the way (I assume) CJW is organizing the project. I think containing scene files only in the relevant project should de-clutter the bar. Then again, I usually don’t have more than 10 scene files for any given project, so I usually don’t run into clutter problems.

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@CJW: Since some people prefer a sidebar over a topbar – is it possible to have the bar itself snap to either the top or side, depending on preference (sort of like how a Window’s bar or Apple’s OS bar can be changed)?

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If it’s not too much work, maybe just have both? A collapsible sidebar and a topbar? Most IDEs I’ve used/seen have both.

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Another suggestion re:navbar:
Auto-hide collapsible navbar. When your mouse hover near the bar’s vicinity, it’ll slide out and show you full title of the filenames/scenes. When your mouse click on the main editor window, the navbar will collapse.

Similar to Windows’s auto-hide taskbar, may be applied to both top and side navbar scheme. I’m not a back-end coder (nor a front one, tbh), so this might take some time should you decide to do this.

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Notepad++ uses that topbar as well and it’s a real pain in the neck if you have a lot of files to edit. Only being able to see a small number of project files and having to constantly scroll back and forth gets very annoying very quickly. If it had an option to expand vertically to show all the files it wouldn’t be so bad but, that, frankly, is one reason I don’t use Notepad++ for large (non CS) projects if I can avoid it.

You guys can actually use Ctrl + Alt + PgUp/PgDown to quickly navigate tabs. Works pretty much on any programs.

Putting this here in case anyone didn’t know.

Is there an APK of this yet? My laptop’s shot, so I’d appreciate being able to code on my phone or tablet. The online version obviously isn’t meant for mobile use…