Questions on approaching Twine/twee

A quick handful of questions about twee + twine: I’m interested in playing around with this development system, but I have zero interest in the GUI app. Yet I see that Twine seems to still be under active development, while twee (the command line app) is not. Are there things that I can do with twee that I couldn’t do with Twine? Or are there new features (e.g. macros) in Twine that aren’t in twee?

It seems that maybe the standard practice for those who want to actually write code to have to import it into Twine and then compile–is that accurate?

I didn’t use the command-line Twee, but I don’t think that the macros are dependent on the compiler. I could be wrong. Basically, all that including a macro call does is add a Javascript call. The macros are already defined in the template you use (ex: Sugarcane) or by adding them yourself in a “script” passage.

As a test, I can try compiling Hallowmoor with Twee and see what happens. I would expect to end up with exactly the same file, but I’ll let you know.

(Edit) Hmm. I don’t have a Twee compiler. Maybe it’s separate from Twine.

Yeah, it seems rather bizarrely designed. Twine and Twee are separate–I imagine that Twine duplicates all of Twee, but without providing a command line interface. Similarly, if all macros are in the template, I would guess that there is a huge amount of code duplication between the templates, since most of the macros described in the gimcrackd docs apply to both of the standard templates…

And thence my question: Since everything is duplicated between Twee and Twine, how much am I missing if I use Twee (which hasn’t been developed in 4 years) rather than Twine? It sounds like maybe I can just use the templates distributed with the newer Twine and be all right. Anybody else using Twee rather than Twine?

I use Twee, with the updated templates. It seems to work fine.

As far as I can tell, all of the Twine development has been either to the templates or to the interface portion of the GUI. The underlying compilation hasn’t changed at all (which makes sense, as it’s basically just “turn each passage into a div and insert them all into the template”)

Thanks, Shadow Wolf. That’s good to hear. I’ve got myself set up with a nice little workflow now, using the SublimeText 2 syntax highlighter from here and the patched Twee from here. With a simple little shell script hooked into SublimeText’s build system, I can hit a single keypress to compile a project consisting of multiple Twee source files and auto-open the result in my browser.

(Apparently, there is a dedicated Twee client for Mac OS 10.7+. I can’t use it, being stuck on 10.6, but maybe someone else can.)

By the way Merk, it’s Hallowmoor that has gotten me interested in investigating Twine/Twee, so thanks for that!

Another question: templates seem to be treated entirely differently by Twine and Twee. Twine has a simple header.html file for each template, whereas Twee seems to require a suite of files for a template to work properly, at minimum head.html, local.js, and maybe some other files (e.g. body.html).

Am I correct in inferring from instructions such as these that, for Twee, the proper way to install new templates (beyond Jonah and Sugarcane), or to update older versions of those, is to just place the header.html from the new template into one of these older folders, alongside its head.html, local.js, etc.? EDIT: If this works, it only works for updating old ones, not for totally new ones. And I’m not sure that it works with old ones in any case.

Or it there a newer version of Twee somewhere that uses the (seemingly newer) header.html method of templating? (Or, if there’s some resource on the web that explains all this, I’d love to be pointed to it!)

OK, figured this out. The Twee from here, despite being advertised as “fixed”, is out of date. The tweecode/twee on github uses the new template format.

Twine apparently has an official site now: twinery.org/

If you’re more interested into command line, you can create your games from a simple syntax and export it to a format readable by twee:

anamnese.online.fr/site2/textall … oa_en.html

There is a showcase here:

anamnese.online.fr/site2/textall … lue_death/

It supports adding pictures and such, but not for special scripts using macros.