I played Stygian Dreams online, to have the full features of the game. As the author said feedback is very welcome, I made an extensive annotated transcript of my playthrough.
I used the normal SCRIPT command to start it. The game showed the usual acknowledgement that it was recording (“Start of a transcript of…”). Since I was playing online, I expected the transcript to be downloaded to my computer when I typed SCRIPT OFF, like with an online Adventuron transcript.
I didn’t get it. Did it go straight to the author or to the Spring Thing organiser? Was it stored in a cloud? Is it floating forever in the void?
I wouldn’t know the details, but is it possible to look in, say, your downloads directory for the latest file? Or maybe if you have an application like the everything application for windows, you can search for the latest files created, or files created within a certain time frame. You also might be able to search for files with extension of txt or log.
I doubt it has vanished, and actually, your post has given me motivation to actually look at the entry myself, which I sort of wanted to. I’ll try a few things on my end.
ETA:
I tried stuff from Parchment & the Transcript Command & I’m pretty sure I tried the stuff I usually try, to pull transcripts. I wasn’t able to find anything in my recent cache on springthing.net or Stygian Dreams by GJMen. Perhaps there’s some unexpected interaction with Vorple that is breaking something?
At any rate, I was able to highlight some text and then hit ctrl-a. This probably isn’t helpful to Rovarsson, who has closed the window, but in case anyone still will look at SD, you know how to make a transcript online. (Though I can’t assure anyone that the webpage buffer will retain all text!)
Yeah… trying it out briefly, and looking at the Vorple source code, I don’t see an obvious way to do it. And this thread from February doesn’t sound promising either…
Yes, I can confirm that it took a lot of digging in the browser’s local storage, and though I was eventually able to obtain the game text, it was a huge mess—it seemed as though each new command causes Vorple to save all the text displayed by the game so far to the transcript file, and NO COMMANDS were saved whatsoever, so all my annotations were lost.
In my experience, when you start the script it asks you where you want to save it. I haven’t tried to transcript from a browser session though… [after testing] Yeah, it saves but doesn’t ask where, so it’s somewhere in that mystery cookie void.
However, if you go to start another transcript it lists the previous one, but it doesn’t look like there’s a way to recall or download or save it?
Aha, that mysterious EDIT button - I had to close the game and start a new session after naming the first one. Then I typed TRANSCRIPT again and hit EDIT:
Select one:
Hit DISPLAY:
This will likely only work on the same computer in the same browser and not if cache/cookies have been deleted.
When I started a transcript, the game only asked for a name (“RovarssonStygianScript” I think I called it). In my attempts to retrieve it somehow, I did restart the game (same computer, same browser, cookies/cache not cleared) and started a new transcript which I simply called “WhereDidYouGoTest”.
Nothing resembling the list of previous transcripts with buttons, “Edit” or otherwise, showed up when I did that.
I get a dialog box a bit like this:
www.springthing.net asks
Enter filename:
/blank box for entering filename/
OK-button/Delete-button
I ran several searches on my computer but neither of the transcripts are on it. They must be indeed floating in the void.
Without further modifications to the interpreters and GLK, currently the only way to pass messages through the parser to the browser is to hack in to some pre-existing method. I used the left status line for my experiments, but that caused some problems in downloaded files played on an interpreter. Vorple instead hacks the save system, I believe, and possibly the transcripts. So that’s probably why it’s not showing up, as I believe the channels you’re used to using have been co-opted by vorple.
Making a note of this. Considering i wasn’t even aware of the concept of a transcript until after the competition, it didn’t quite occur to me to give it a look. For future reference i’ll see what can be done, it’s probably something that needs to be manually set up from the author side.
Yeah, that’s a tricky thing even for experienced programmers. I know as a tester I’ve kicked myself for forgetting to start a transcript.
So I have an idea! If you feel it’s appropriate, you could maybe have a meta-joke in here about how the text will be washed away, and likely your memories to it, or access to memories, once you hit enter.
You don’t want it to be too on-the-nose but maybe it could be an input bubble like you had to ask the player’s name, and it’s one we can’t leave blank, so a mistaken arrow key or enter won’t trigger clearing the text. Maybe even explicitly make the player type a command like >FORGET.
