Had a really close call with Squiffy last night. Been working on a big game, out to 1500 lines. Worked on it on and off over the weekend, just enjoying myself. Last night after dinner, I sat down with a bunch of new ideas I had and entered them in over two hours or so. New sections here, new sections there, additions to code all over the place.

Then I went to run it.

Syntax error.

Uh oh.

Fortunately, I remembered one line I didn't think would work. I went there, deleted it, hit run - the adventure started up. But that made me think - Since Squiffy doesn't identify failures by line number (or even the text of the line), it's probably a good idea to hit run every so often while developing just to make sure the thing works. In my case, if it hadn't been that line, I don't know what I would have done to find it. Probably delete section by section until it started up, just to find it.

Don't forget that there is a command line version of Squiffy available. That shows error and warning messages by line #. It might be worth setting up that version as a 'backup' way of error checking, even if you don't use it normally.

Bluevoss wrote:Had a really close call with Squiffy last night. Been working on a big game, out to 1500 lines. Worked on it on and off over the weekend, just enjoying myself. Last night after dinner, I sat down with a bunch of new ideas I had and entered them in over two hours or so. New sections here, new sections there, additions to code all over the place.

Then I went to run it.

Syntax error.

Uh oh.

Fortunately, I remembered one line I didn't think would work. I went there, deleted it, hit run - the adventure started up. But that made me think - Since Squiffy doesn't identify failures by line number (or even the text of the line), it's probably a good idea to hit run every so often while developing just to make sure the thing works. In my case, if it hadn't been that line, I don't know what I would have done to find it. Probably delete section by section until it started up, just to find it.

Really? Where does one get it? I've downloaded the windows version. Looked around on the site. Where do you get it from?

That WOULD be a handy thing to have...

Bluevoss wrote:Really? Where does one get it? I've downloaded the windows version. Looked around on the site. Where do you get it from?

That WOULD be a handy thing to have...

There is a link on the main Squiffy documentation page, under "Using Squiffy".
http://docs.textadventures.co.uk/squiffy/

When it says you can edit your file in any text editor . . .
I actually use the Squiffy offline editor to edit and 'run' the script. But usually not to "build" the game for testing in a browser window. For that, I use the command line, with the "--scriptonly" command added at the end. ("squiffy myGame.squiffy --scriptonly"). That way, any changes I make to the HTML and CSS files are not overwritten with the defaults when the game file is compiled.