- Nov 24, 2018
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Yeah, I originally wrote AC for Chaotic. His first engine worked on some browsers but not others, and I kept needing to fix his code to play it on the browser I used. He used some of that code, including the variable stuff as you see, but I don't think he uses the program itself.
I guess there are two parts to AC. The first is the program where you enter your text and hit targets and the second is the JavaScript the program outputs. Over the years, I continuously changed the JavaScript output as I added functionality. Originally it made individual HTML files, because that was what Chaotic was doing and I wanted to make it easy for him to transition to it. As I got into using the program myself to write my own games, though, I changed things around. I made it so that there was a single HTML file and all of the text was in a single JavaScript file. That allowed me to spell check easily and made it easy to have localizers translate games to other languages. Etc.
I don't precisely remember what the JavaScript differences were between AC1 and AC2, but I completely rewrote the program when I did AC2. AC1 had grown organically over the years, and I had coded myself into a corner a bunch of times. It was fine when I was writing short games, but it bogged down when I started writing longer ones. I remember at one point the Game View window that showed all of the pages took like 15 seconds to come up. That was ridiculous. So I rewrote the program to be clean. Also, while I was at it, I heavily optimized the workflow (the actions you do to create multiple pages) for how I used it, which made me really fast at putting pages together.
Yesterday Mortze sent me the images for one of the Elsa's Nightmares chapters and I put together the Renpy files. Night and day difference between how I used to work (AC2 was much faster).
Of course, I could always write a new tool for myself to make Renpy fast too. We'll see.
Tlaero
I guess there are two parts to AC. The first is the program where you enter your text and hit targets and the second is the JavaScript the program outputs. Over the years, I continuously changed the JavaScript output as I added functionality. Originally it made individual HTML files, because that was what Chaotic was doing and I wanted to make it easy for him to transition to it. As I got into using the program myself to write my own games, though, I changed things around. I made it so that there was a single HTML file and all of the text was in a single JavaScript file. That allowed me to spell check easily and made it easy to have localizers translate games to other languages. Etc.
I don't precisely remember what the JavaScript differences were between AC1 and AC2, but I completely rewrote the program when I did AC2. AC1 had grown organically over the years, and I had coded myself into a corner a bunch of times. It was fine when I was writing short games, but it bogged down when I started writing longer ones. I remember at one point the Game View window that showed all of the pages took like 15 seconds to come up. That was ridiculous. So I rewrote the program to be clean. Also, while I was at it, I heavily optimized the workflow (the actions you do to create multiple pages) for how I used it, which made me really fast at putting pages together.
Yesterday Mortze sent me the images for one of the Elsa's Nightmares chapters and I put together the Renpy files. Night and day difference between how I used to work (AC2 was much faster).
Of course, I could always write a new tool for myself to make Renpy fast too. We'll see.
Tlaero