Upcoming ChoiceScript Feature: Checkpoints

[CJW]

@dfabulich

Checkpoints each have their own “save slot,” but smPlugin uses the legacy “password” system, which includes the current playthrough’s save slot, but not the checkpoint save slots.

That means that even if Dashingdon and/or Moody Ink were to include my latest code, if you *save_checkpoint at the start of chapter 3, then save in the middle of chapter 3 with smPlugin, then restart the game, and then restore back to the middle of chapter 3, when you *restore_checkpoint at the end of chapter 3, your game will crash.

I’m… going to have to think about how to fix this.

smPlugin has been deprecated for a long time now in favour of the GitHub - ChoicescriptIDE/ChoiceScriptSavePlugin: A small addon script for ChoiceScript to allow control over persistent (hard) saves., which doesn’t use the password system (but provides similar functionality to smPlugin). Unfortunately, I don’t think dashingdon or moody.ink ever upgraded. I don’t think you should need to change your design over that incompatibility. Ideally those sites should update their plugins, or deprecate them in favour of an official solution. If the ChoiceScriptSavePlugin linked above is also incompatible with the checkpoint system, I’ll be happy to modify it to be compatible.

@dfabulich

I think I can gradually begin that process.

For my first guess, I think the main thing to do is just to make it super, super easy for people to use a tool like CSIDE (at first, probably literally CSIDE) to generate a single-file HTML file for their game, and for that HTML file to include a unique storeName (perhaps based on the IFID?).

That way, people can just upload HTML files to Itch.io or something…?

CSIDE is already capable of exporting a compiled game, but I’m happy to make any other changes that are required too. I’d love to implement a direct built-in feature to upload straight to itch.io, but they don’t have an API capable of that, as far as I’m aware.

@HannahPS

If it would be possible to generate an HTML file like this without CSIDE as well, that would be brilliant as not everyone uses it.

There’s a compile.html/compile.js shipped directly with ChoiceScript (which is basically what CSIDE uses too). The only thing I think vanilla ChoiceScript is missing is a way to automatically generate the ifid.