Getting Twine media to load locally with Chromebook

Authoring Twine
1

Twine Version: 2.3.5
Story Format: SugarCube 2.30.0
Chrome OS: 79.0.3945.123

I’m teaching a class using Twine, and of course my students are very interested in adding sounds, music, and images to their stories. However, we are authoring on Chromebooks which has a very limited file system. And because the Chromebook is essentially all web apps, we’re forced to use the online Twine IDE.

I’ve tried to create stories that have media uploaded to an external site, but I’m running into problems (maybe a bandwidth issue when my whole class is working). So, instead I’m trying to hack the “Downloads” folder to store local media.

I found out the relative path by entering ~/downloads into my browser:
file:///home/chronos/u-7316b76abcfa049ba2259f1e20d64d7b6c90e0c7/downloads

But it doesn’t work with the following code:

In my StoryInit passage:

<<cacheaudio "mymusic" "file:///home/chronos/u-7316b76abcfa049ba2259f1e20d64d7b6c90e0c7/downloads/music.mp3">>
<<waitforaudio>>

In a later passage (not the initial starting passage):

<<masteraudio stop>>
<<audio "mymusic" loop play>>

I’ve also tried chrome://downloads/music.mp3, but that doesn’t work either.

Any ideas? If I’m kicking a dead horse here, I’ll go back to figuring out the external URL location.

Thanks!

2

Exactly what error message is generated when the file can’t be accessed?
Subtle differences among similar messages can be meaningful and paraphrasing them can mislead someone who is trying to help.

I don’t own a Chromebook, but a quick Web search suggests that you might need to specify “Downloads” instead of “downloads”. The file system is case sensitive, so check the rest of the file specification, too.

Also, don’t forget that the cryptic number in the middle of the file specification is unique to you. It’ll be different for each of your students.

3

There’s no error message. The story runs as normal, but without images or sound. (Pictures display as a broken image link.) So, I’m guessing the local absolute path must be wrong…

Should the browser based Twine IDE be able to load local images with an absolute path? (I know audio won’t work like that.)

I have been able to get this to work with a relative path by publishing to file and opening the html file directly. It would just be nice, though, to be able to test without publishing to file each time.