List of all stories by word length

General
63

Your welcome. It is one of the things I had to work on with my update to UnNatural especially when I added the option for the player to choose to be Nonbinary. I was surprised how many additional variables it added to the game as grammar is a fickle thing. I think its worth the extra work though.

3 Likes
64

I think i’ll still just go with copying text for now. For some reason the prospect of having to *create all verbs etc that’d change eats more spoons than the prospect of the additional work

65

If you use @CJW’s CSIDE there is a pronoun sample project that helped me with the additonal pronouns.

For example in my nano project Daemonglass I use

*create xhild “”
*create xhey “”
*comment This is the they/she/he pronoun.
*create xhem “”
*comment This is the them/her/him pronoun.
*create xheir “”
*comment This is the their/her/his pronoun.
*create xheirs “”
*comment This is the theirs/hers/his pronoun.
*create xhemself “”
*comment This is the themself/herself/himself pronoun.
*create x_s “s”
*comment This is for the ‘s’ on the ends of verbs, as in “they walk”/“she walks”.
*create x_es “es”
*comment This is for the ‘es’ on the ends of verbs, as in “they march”/“she marches”.
*create x_re “'s”
*create x_ve “'s”
*create x_is “is”
*create x_nt “esn’t”
*create x_ed “ed”

this is for the MC then for the mentor I just copy and paste that and add the prefix m_ (likewise for the friend prefix f_ and the rival m_ i also create a special s_ variation for scenes where the player can be with the mentor, friend or rival.

2 Likes
66

Trying to think of how many verbs doe require more than an s to make them singular…

67

Actually, by having tons of variables, it gives you more freedom to control how those pronouns-verb interaction will be.

FYI, if you’re already familiar with the @{} multireplace operator, you just need 4 basic pronouns (+ 1 to-be for they)

The “they/their/theirs/them (+ is/are)”.
For the rest, use the operator.

Of course the actual text can be a clustervuk of code-symbols, but you won’t have to create tons of variables.

2 Likes
68

that operator won’t work for me oddly enough (as said, I probably am putting it in the wrong place in the code)

69

Maybe you forgot to put the separator pipe? The “|” ?

70

Just do this

Variable name : Variable
Values will be between 1 - 3

@{Variable Hi | Hey | Yo}

Of the value of Variable is 1 it will print Hi if its 2 it will print Hey and of its 3 it will print Yo

71

Thanks again all, but as said, bit of autism getting in the way. Before my motivation takes a nose-dive due to sudden anxiety peak, I’ll stay with the additional text and just adjust the wordcount down by 25%

But hopefully this’ll help others :slight_smile:

72

Please. Try it once on your own.

Please please please…

It’s so disheartening to see someone not understanding what you were trying to tell them.

( if you don’t want to it’s perfectly fine because ahem… )

:running_man: :dash:

73

I understand, it’s something that gets easier with time. After all its taken a few years working on UnNatural on and off and it’s only this year when I made the decision to do a major edit that I started to feel competant enough to refine the code. So just do what suits you best, you can always go back later to tidy up and refine code after a bit more experience. :slight_smile:

1 Like
74

I use gosub quite a bit.

1 Like
75

I might…
But I need the spoons for it first

Edit:
My main problem remains:
I don’t even know WHERE in the code to put it.
not to mention can
@{(gender_child_count = “plural”) | s } even work?

1 Like
76

This is me :joy:
Though to be fair my estimates on “the operatives” length put it at 400-500k words. :smiley:
But, I am hoping to go longer… Mainly for quiet moments between characters.

2 Likes
77

That should work perfectly fine. As for the placement, the rule is similar as the ${}

1 Like
78

I’ll try tomorrow after making a backup file.
Thanks again people :slight_smile:
(Also this might mean my WIP might get a big major update before thursday)

3 Likes
79

A few more thoughts about this. I religiously avoid repeated text, but when I think about how many words I lose as a result, I don’t think it’s huge. Maybe 1 in 5 words tops would be repeated if I didn’t use gosubs to avoid it. So that’d be an inflation of like 100K on Magics. It would look big both before and after cleanup.

The other thought is, it takes a pretty long time to write a lot of words, and CoG doesn’t really have a lot to gain by casting suspicion on particular works or the metric, so can’t we just look at that hard work and say rah rah yay?

I think we can. Yay!

7 Likes
80

@Eric_Moser I’ve never used gosub either, I find it a bit confusing to understand. I’m not sure I’m understanding exactly why it’s needed even after the explanations here unless it’s something that is going to pop up in random sections that you can’t link with a single goto at the end? (And even then it could be linked with an *if although I guess that is less efficient using a few extra words like *if (scene = “one”) *goto garden. *if (scene = “two”) *goto car. Surely most things could avoid repeats with *if’s, *goto’s, *labels and variables?

Like if I was to write a choice that I didn’t want repeating text to talk to the gardener, I’d either use an *if or a label like:

*choice
#Go into the backyard
Explore yard
*label garden
Talk to gardener
*goto next

#Go into the front yard
Check the mail box and cars.
*goto garden

#Stay inside.
Something completely different. Do not talk to gardener.
*goto next

Or could just have an *if command below the *label next, that only allows the garden text to show up if you didn’t stay inside.

Anyway, not entering the contest, but just wondering if I’m missing something that I should be doing? :thinking:

(BTW- not repeating text is good for if you make mistakes so you don’t have to change it in 5 different places later! Not just coding efficient, but time efficient. Lesson learned from my first attempt.)

81

I use *gosub_scene in UnNatural for both the partner select and the weapon select choices. Then rather than repeating the choices in episodes 3-6 for each case I just use *gosub_scene weapon_choice and *gosub_scene partner_choice saves a lot of unneeded code that way.

3 Likes
82

Oh, I think I might have just understood. Does the gosub let you acess text from a different scene? So if you were in the file chapter1 and wanted to got to the weapons select, you could have another document with that in there instead of having to repeat the text for the weapon select in each scene it could pop up?

1 Like