I was wondering, is there a way to make text that didn’t appear in previous playthrough appear in a different color/font/something? Because I feel like in CoG, a lot of times I end up reading the same text over and over again, except with slight variances. I’d like to see those slight variations rather than have to read the whole thing and squint to see if anything is different.
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I don’t know if this is possible, but it’s a really good idea that I’d like to see as well.
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The team is currently focused on Omnibus, but I do hope that we can get more text customization (including orientation, or even table. Oh, would be godly).
I’m not holding my breath though, but again, Choice of Magic has colorful stat bars.
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So does Fallen Hero.
That’s something documented on the wiki already.
The question I’d rather ask is: How would the game know? How would it know that you made a decision in a playthrough you didn’t make in any of the previous ones?
What about flavor text based on stats?
How would the game know you did not read the text for e.g. having a high quiet stat in one playthrough compared to the ones before.
And when would the information storage kill one’s phone? Like, sure, if you only play until you’ve allegedly seen everything, you might stop, but what about others? How full will their storage get after a while?
Especially when you have complex games with lots of little variations?
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Ah, Fallen Hero is just a bit tweak on the CSS side.
CoM is a- well… not a full revamp, but @kgold definitely messed up with the ChoiceScript itself which requires Javascript experience.
To the user it’s the same. But stuffing the storage (which this would require) would piss people off. And I can imagine that clearing that would delete the process made, because of variables that’d be tied to it and achievements etc.
To clarify, the CSS modification is as simple as changing “red” to “orange” somewhere in the .css.
And you’re thinking this too hard. The “stuffing the storage” thing you mentioned is anything but bigger than the cover image of the game itself, I’d bet. A 10000 characters of a string won’t even exceed 5KB, unlike .png cover art that can occupies 1MB in the memory.
Edit: well, I cross-checked with my scene.txt, and 150K characters actually occupies about 150KB.
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Would it?
I’m thinking like this:
If you have a game where the differences are small, sure:
*fake_choice
#a
text a
*set var1 a
#b
text b
*set var1 b
#c
text c
*set var1 c
main text ${variable}
-later-
*if (var1 = a)
goto x
etc
If the game is set up like this, okay
but what if this:
*rand randomthing 1 4
*fake_choice
#a
text a
*set var1 a
*set var2 true
*set stat1 25
#b
text b
*set var1 b
*set stat1 45
#c
text c
*set var1 c
*set var2 true
*set stat1 60
main text ${variable} @{randomthing 1| 2| 3| 4}.
-later-
text @{var2 thing1| thing2}.
*if ((randomthing = 3) and (var2 = false))
text A
*goto x
*elseif ((randomthing = 3) and (var2))
text B
*goto y
*else
text C
*goto x
I’m not going to calculate the various combinations here. Sure, it would be ‘ticking off boxes’ so to speak, but…
especially when dealing with random text etc, variables the games would have to generate automatically in the background might be a bit… overboard just because some people only want to see what new thing they got.
honest advice: get the game unlocked on the page and check the code.
I can assure you at least, that CoG games (regardless of tracking branch/history) are unlikely to ever prove to be a big space problem on phones… Particuarly if the Omnibus is ever implemented to allow one instance of the CS files to run all the packaged games.
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I don’t know how, but for example, Ren’Py has a feature that allows the player to skip all text that was previously seen. It’s definitely possible, but I think it needs to be built into the engine itself. I might mess around with ChoiceScript and see what’s up with that.
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Back to the other question though: why?
Why do that to begin with?
Sorry, but personally I don’t see any reason for that.
When one is playing a game many times, it is often interesting and efficient to see what text has been previously unread, especially if there are minor flavor changes that might go unnoticed on less-than intense scrutiny of a playthrough. It is a common feature of visual novels to be able to skip to unread text, and this would serve a similar function. I use it all the time for visual novels.
Reading code is a bit different because you wouldn’t have an indication of “what’s different” this time through and code can offer spoilers that might be unwanted.
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Yeah, okay, but i’m still worried this might have negative effects.
I mean, would that encourage authors to put more work into things or lead to superfluos variables to give the illusion of a high replay value to see all text?
Edit: i dont mean to attack anyone, sorry should it have come across as such.
i suspect that authors would not spend time creating counterfeit variables or branches solely for the purpose of deceit. I am not sure to what end that would be. People can inflate wordcount now by pasting in the dictionary in a comment at the end of their game and I don’t see a lot of that. What you suggest would be patently obvious to any casual reader of the code. It’s all risk, no reward.
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Im not certain, but i think when rachel does the count she removes all codetext. Wouldnt that include *comment?
I believe wordcount includes code.
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I remember rachel said she runs it through the console to remove code? Should we tag her and ask?
Edit: i mean, we have the thread about how some people wont buy short games. And upping the wordcount like that would be… bad
I feel like highlighting unseen text could get very fiddly, simply because fragments of sentences in different colours might make it hard to read. But I wonder whether it could be possible to change the colour of a choice you had picked in a previous playthrough to show that you had or hadn’t seen that choice before. I’m not sure that I’d use it myself, but it could have a similar effect.
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Legend.
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Maybe something like a different font? So it’s still readable. And definitely an option to turn it off/on, so people who don’t like it don’t have to use it.
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