Twine Sugarcube - how to prevent audio cache error if user reloads browser

Authoring Twine
1

Twine Version: 2
Story Format: 2.34.1

Hi, thanks for all the help in the past!

So my first passage has:

<<cacheaudio “ping” “https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/xyz.flac” “media/audio/ping.ogg”>>\

And most of the passages start with:

<<audio “ping” play>>

However if the user reloads their browser at any point, they will get the following error on every passage (and no sound).

“Error: (doublebrackets)audio(doublebrackets): error during runner initialization: track “ping” does not exist”

I’m assuming that caching audio on every passage is going to cause data download repeatedly which doesn’t seem reasonable (no idea - does it?), and possibly will slow the game down (does it?).

So I tried adding the following to the top of each passage as a fix, but it doesn’t work.

if (!(SimpleAudio.tracks.has(“ping”))) {
<<cacheaudio “ping” “https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/xyzetc.flac” “media/audio/ping.ogg”>>
}

I’m not sure this code can even go in a passage because twine displays it, so it’s clearly not implemented right. Maybe code for the API doesn’t go in the passages - no idea. The motoslave documentation doesn’t seem to say what you actually do with those sort of snippets.

In future I’ll load the audio from C/username/somewhere, rather than wikimedia, so I guess I could re-cache the audio at the start of every single passage? Seems like overkill though.

Any advice appreciated!

2

When you say “your first passage”, do you mean the passage where your game starts? Because as the documentation for <<cacheaudio>> says, the best place to set up tracks is a passage named StoryInit. That exists specifically to work around this problem.

3

Thanks for this. I stupidly believed that StoryInit was something like the stylesheet and javascript pages, and always wondered why my version of Twine doesn’t have a ‘StoryInit’. You’ve helped me realise that it’s something the user has to create for themselves!

1 Like