...I'd wish that the squiffy editor would identify lines where JS errors occur. To me, this is a real killer.
I guess it's on my mind because last night, while coding, I think I must have accidentally touched, shifted, deleted something because I couldn't compile. I ended up saving off every section I thought I'd recently worked on and still couldn't find it. So then I had to go back a version (thank goodness I version) and section-by-section add the new stuff. Since THAT compiled just fine, I have to figure that I'd have never found it otherwise.
I'll second this! The bigger the game the less likely I'm able to actually use it in a timely fashion. I can't get it to load just because of some missing character somewhere.
If you have an older version, you could do a file compare between the old and new to see where the differences are, which might help? Notepad++ has a plugin that lets you compare two files, highlighting all the differences.
As an aside - and no help to you guys - Quest 6 tells you exactly when the error is!
You WOULD have to throw that into the mix. I looked at Quest but I didn't like the way it worked - I can write games in my own style in Squiffy. What I'm saying is I'm more of a gamebooker than a wanderer.
Felt the same way when I was an Atari user. Loved Ataris but I go into a game store and gradually there were less and less games for the Atari. And now it's the same with Quest and Squiffy.
As for keeping track of things, yes, I always work on a new version every session. It gives me a fallback if I really screw something up. But since I work in VBA/excel during the day and JS/Squiffy in the dead of night, I'd sure like a better editor (and even, dare we suggest, a debugger). A poor developer can dream...
As an aside - and no help to you guys - Quest 6 tells you exactly when the error is!
Is this something fancy you've done; or just the fact that you have meaningful line numbers when working from JS source?
I did wonder if Squiffy could catch errors and translate line numbers in story.js back to the line in the source file that they correspond to; but it seems that Error.prototype.lineNumber (despite being an obviously useful feature) is non-standard and only exists in Firefox.
Actually… the format of stack is fairly strict, so I could probably parse it and translate the line numbers… but that's still a bit of a bodge, and fragile against new browser versions (as I don't believe that format is actually specified anywhere)
Squiffy is able to report "WARNING: null line 1: In section '_default' there is a link to a section called [[section]], which doesn't exist"
Is there a way to expand that so that it catches missing curly brackets and JS errors and such?