sorry if the terminology isn’t correct, but the issue is simple:
when entering a passage containing a long text, the page is rendered complete, but is viewed from the centre of instead of the top (I’m not sure if I explained well…)
of course, this forces the player to do a page up to start reading, and if the player don’t notice that he’s reading from somewhere in the middle, ends being seriously confused. and this is definitively NOT a good thing.
@klembot I think there might be a bug with Chapbook.
When you go from one long passage (needing scrolling to read all) to another long one, the page doesn’t scroll back to the top, but only refreshes the text. So if you’re at the bottom of the first long passage, it will display the bottom of the second long passage (needing you to scroll back up the page)…
See this file: Chapbook.txt (3.1 KB)
Click on the Test link twice to see it happen.
I wonder if this is legacy from the “continuous scroll” format…
Twine is rendering the long text. When the player chooses, Twine renders the next page top to bottom (as if scrolling) and leaves focus at the bottom. This would make visual sense to the player if the previous passage were scrolling away and revealing the new one, but since it’s replacing what came before, it’s just leaving focus at the bottom of the new long passage text instead of returning to the top. It actually did “scroll” through the second page text, the player just didn’t notice it since it clears the screen.
It’s like how a printer that doesn’t paginate prints in order - page1, page2, page3, but when you grab the document page 3 is on top in the printer tray since that’s the last thing the device did in order.
I don’t know if Twine has or had a “more” scroll feature to pause screen-filling text with a prompt to continue, but that sort of makes sense if that’s how it’s building a page. Most Twine games generally have passages that fit mostly inside one screen and it’s only noticeable with multi-page text dumps.
no, HAL, the issue is not one of scrolling, but one of what text is initially on screen.
let’s use for a moment the good ol’ 25 line text screen, and let’s say that the wall of text is 47 lines long.
Justly one expect that arriving at a passage, one see on its screen lines 1-25, then pressing page down the remaining line, 26-47.
The issue I have is that arriving at a passage one sees lines, say, 14-39, and this can either annoy (having to press page up first, then page down twice for reading the entire passage) or confuse the player (not realising that there’s lines above the apparent first line, missing a good chunk of text)
Hope this explain the issue, and
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
This is not a Twine issue, but a Chapbook one. Both SugarCube and Harlowe, by default, scroll back to the top without any issue (unless you messed around with the interface/CSS of the page).
This was not an issue in Chapbook 1.2.3 (i just tested it)
