[CSIDE] The ChoiceScript IDE

[CJW]

Hello everyone, I hope you are all enjoying CSIDE and finding it useful in your CS endeavours!

A fairly hefty update (likely to be dubbed 1.3.0) is on the horizon, and the backlog of potential new features and improvements is always increasing (those who are curious can see that here). More news on that to come shortly.

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In the meantime, I have a recruitment call!

Fluff:
During the early development stages of CSIDE I was assisted by a fantastic team of individuals in a beta testing PM thread. They’d give me anything from daily to weekly feedback on (at the time) private builds and we’d have some good back and forth discussions about what worked (or didn’t).

With the full release of the IDE I decided to discontinue that team in favour of discussing everything out in the open. A year on, it’s become fairly clear to me that the forum thread doesn’t quite fill the same need. Whereas the large forum thread is great for reactive feedback, once a feature has been implemented and people have had a play with it, small groups are much better for very quick and early feedback on larger chunks of work or plain design ideas, that might otherwise take a long time to actually implement, polish or make stable.

TL;DR
To cut a long story short, I’m looking to revive this system, and would like to ask if there are any regular users of CSIDE who would like to participate in this new testing PM thread. This is admittedly a something for nothing ask, you won’t be getting any direct preferential treatment (as the ‘development’ channel you’ll be using is now publicly available and will probably remain so). What you will get however, is an opportunity to have a pro-active say in the direction of CSIDE, i.e. an opportunity to talk to me directly and frequently, and attempt to veto, +1 or suggest things while (or even before) I’ve set code to editor.

The only other thing I’ll add is that this is a discussion group, so will likely only suit people who…

• Are willing to use the cutting edge and possibly unstable development channel
• Using (or willing to use) CSIDE as a primary development tool
• Actively writing CS and using CSIDE day-to-day
• Willing to talk in a discussion format, this means daily (or bi-daily) replies*

*This isn’t a hard rule, but if you’re only chipping in once a week, you’re going to get left behind.

With all that said, I should point out again that you can access the development channel without committing to this thread, and people are more than welcome to play around with it and give feedback here from any and all the channels. Every tiny bit of feedback from “it’s great” to “I’ve found this bug…” and “What about this feature?” has been and continues to be very much appreciated.

Thank you all!

[Vendetta]

I’m delighted that you’ve decided to bring back the beta testing thread as the end result of “the last time around” speaks for itself – and can only get better. Count me in!

[Ylva]

@CJW I’ve had this weird thing with CSIDE for a while now (2~3 months) where after a few seconds of inactivity some parts of the screen will randomly get blurred until I move the cursor to them. It persists even while I’m writing on another part. I don’t really know if this is a problem or a feature (at least I don’t think it’s a feature?).

Anyways, I’m just looking for clarification if it’s a feature because for some reason it really annoys me when the screen gets like this:

[CJW]

Not a feature. Sounds like some odd issue with the app’s rendering/your graphics card. Would you mind PMing me your computer’s specifications? CPU, GPU, operating system etc?

[Jake8517]

@CJW

This happened to me today and I not sure what happened could anyone explain it to me. I just hope the save didn’t get corrupted because my most recent useable file I can use is from the first of july and as it only has 2.1k words and the one that had this happen to it was a 4k.

I don’t know if it would help but if you load the broken file into sublime text then all you get is a bunch of zeros going on about 1800 lines.

[Nahim_Kerman]

Is this in the browser or the pc version? My God that’s creepy!

I will backup my production versions now!

[Jake8517]

PC version, Windows to be exact and yes back it all up. if I can’t save this I am going to go cry in a corner.

[Nahim_Kerman]

Humpf. I usually write in the online IDE but some of my tests are outside of it because the IDE don’t ‘see’ my *images links for some reason. But until now the only issue I’ve got was the IDE giving me annoying error messages by insisting in look for *goto or *finish were it wasn’t suppose to be. (*fake_choose)

[Szaal]

I think it does get corrupted.

Try to recover your .txt files with Recuva. There should be some handy tutorial on using Recuva to recover .txt files by simple Google search.

[CJW]

Hi Jake, thank you for reporting this! Sadly that does indeed look like a corrupted file. This can happen when you close the application, put the computer to sleep, or otherwise interrupt the application during saving a file.

This has happened before, and I am looking into ways of mitigating the damage this causes, but there is only so much that can be done when a save is interrupted from outside of the application. You should always religiously back up your work, whatever software you may be using! My recommendation is to work on projects that are in cloud-syncing folder, such as those provided by Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive.

As suggested by @Szaal I would give an application like Recuva a go, or if see Windows File History is activated.

If this is a reoccurring issue, you could try disabling CSIDE’s autosave, and give the application a few seconds breathing room before closing it, or shutting your laptop lid/turning off your machine.

If you could PM me any/all information about the events that led up to this (alongside details on what machine you have), I would really appreciate it.

[zionmantis]

I’m sure this has been answered somewhere before and I’m aware it’s completely basic, but I’ve been searching around and just can’t find the answer.

I’m using CSIDE as my first foray into choicescript, and it’s been great so far; I love it.

My game is based on true events and has historical people in it. When you end the game, I’d like to have an epilogue scene that describes the actual people and what really happened.

I want to add photos to each biography, but I don’t understand how to upload images where CSIDE can use them.

For example, I’m using the online version of CSIDE. I figured I could put the image in dropbox with all my other scenes and then be able to somehow open it from CSIDE, but this is not the case.

So let’s say I want to add this image to my game.

I put the image into my folder where CSIDE is drawing from -

And also added the *image command for where I want it to go.

This isn’t working, and I’m not sure what else to try.

Thank you so much.

-Z

[CJW]

Hi zionmantis,

Sorry you’re having trouble. Short answer? I’m afraid you can’t currently. There isn’t really a way to do this with the online IDE, thanks to Dropbox’s various changes in policies/services and APIs over the last few years.

Explanation: It’s no longer possible to get direct access to images on Dropbox. Even with a “share link” you only get what’s called a “preview” of the image, which is a viewable version embedded into a DB website/frame. You don’t get direct access to the image itself, and you can’t really embed the entire page in CSIDE.

There are almost definitely ways around this via usage of the API, but these would likely be quite involved, and I’m not sold on sticking with a Dropbox backend anyway. The dream is to move to @dashingdon 's API, when I find the time.

In the meantime my only suggestion would be to host your images somewhere else (there’s no shortage of free solutions out there, just be careful what you upload where), and use the full URL to them in the *image command. That should work.

Alternatively, the desktop version of CSIDE has no such limitation.

[zionmantis]

Hey, thanks so much!

[Nahim_Kerman]

Semi related. In the IDE it doen’t work but if you try to run your choicescript game out of the IDE it will work normally even if the images are stored into dropbox. That said. I normally test my code in a Test build in the IDE before copy and paste it into my local build and running it on Firefox.

[Fawkes]

I had a thought for a future feature:

Would it be possible to create a sort of “table of contents” for scenes in CSIDE? By “table of contents” I mean creating a section within the program (perhaps in the left sidebar, over or above open projects) that lists all created labels within the scene you have open. When you click on the name of the label in the sidebar, it takes you to it in the scene.

I think a TOC like that would make it easier to navigate long scenes. I know that there’s the search function, but it shows *gotos, and there are times where I can’t remember the exact name of a label.

I have no idea if this is at all possible — or if it’s something you’re already looking into — but I thought it might be a useful feature.

[rinari]

@CJW Is there any chance of having multiple windows of code open at once in the future? Sometimes–when comparing drafts, rewriting, or just wanting to look at another scene/file while writing a new one–it’s really helpful to have side-by-side panels of code to look at; I find that switching back and forth is time-consuming and sometimes loses my place!

[CJW]

Hi Rinari, yes, there is an open issue on GitHub to track the implementation of such a feature: https://github.com/ChoicescriptIDE/main/issues/63

It’s one of many big “editor” focussed improvements that are planned. I’m afraid I can’t give a specific time scale at this moment though.

[Hazel]

I double-checked the help panel and found the ALT+G shortcut, which I had been expecting under CTRL+L due to years of using Java IDEs, so that’s one of my problems solved. I just have to get used to the new shortcut.

A feature that might be nice for me, however, is being able to page through the files of the currently open project, in the same way that I can switch between open tabs on Notepad++ (or program windows in general). Intuitively I’d be looking for that under CTRL+TAB, but any shortcut at all would do. Especially since technically there are no “open tabs” at all in CSIDE.

Is this a feature that appeals to anyone but me? I tried skimming the thread but I wasn’t able to find another reference to this.

[CJW]

Hey Hazel, I think that sounds like a perfectly reasonable request! Shouldn’t be too difficult to implement. I’ll make a ticket to track it. Thank you for the feedback!

EDIT: Done. Tracking here!

[Szaal]

Hm.
I usually go with the CTRL + PageUp/PageDown to navigate between tabs.