Hey all, I’ve made a lot of progress on Chronicler 2.0 today!
As can be seen in the screenshots below, I’ve finally managed to implement connections between bubbles!
These connections are attached to anchor points around the edges of bubbles.
Select the “Link tool” and drag from one bubble to another. The nearest anchor points to where you clicked and released are where the line gets attached. It feels smooth and intuitive to me at least.
You may also notice little bold and italic symbols in the story bubble properties. These allow you to toggle tags around highlighted text.
I’ve also added a base settings menu. There’s a few more sections to add still, but I won’t go into their details until I can make them work. The one thing I’m most excited about though is the ability to add custom themes to Chronicler that allow the user to customize the look of the entire interface. This is done through a style sheet not unlike CSS. Once this is implemented, I believe the “font” section will be removed as those settings can simply be changed in the style sheet.
You may notice the ability to choose the ChoiceScript directory. This allows you to specify the directory that contains the web/mygame folder etc. Once selected, you will have the ability to simply push a “Play” button on the toolbar and Chronicler will launch a webview of your game for easy testing.
Speaking of the play button, I would also like to add a special “Start Here” bubble that allows you to set variables to the values you wish to test with and when you run the game, it starts from that bubble rather than the beginning of the scene. You can place multiple “Start Here” bubbles in each scene to test various scenarios, but only one can be active at a time.
If you would like to help test the latest version, bug reports and feature requests may be posted here: https://github.com/GarrettFleischer/ChroniclerQT/issues
To run the latest version on your OS of choice, download QtCreator from here: https://www.qt.io/ide/ (its free)
Linux users may use their package manager, but be sure to install the Qt developer tools as well as the IDE.
EDIT: Make sure you install Qt 5.5 and the MinGW 4.9.2 compiler (not 5.6)
You may have to go in and configure kits to use the MinGW version not the MSVC one.
Once installed, use git to clone the repository (preferred method), or hit the “download zip” button from here: https://github.com/GarrettFleischer/ChroniclerQT
Once downloaded and extracted, open “ChroniclerNext.pro” with Qt Creator and choose the MinGW 32bit kit.
Click the play button in the bottom left (the one without the bug icon) or press Ctrl+R to run the program.
I release updates daily now, so cloning the repository and checking out the latest revisions is definitely recommended. If you don’t like the git command line tools, there exists the GitHub desktop app, or SourceTree with GUI interfaces.