Workspace: Displaying Variable Jumps with Connection Lines

[heygleeson]

Due to Yarn v2/Yadda syntax allowing for variable jumps (<<jump $var>>), this opens the editor up to having to display non-deterministic story-flow to assist the writer.

What are your current ideas for being able to tackle this? Here are mine:

• new node tag "__possibleJumps", containing an array of possible destinations out of this node, defined manually by the writer (for their own sake)
• read node contents to try and infer it, if possible (seems difficult?): read every possible <<set>> command containing that variable, check the set value against all the nodes to find a match (honestly, sounds like hard mode. how often should this update?)

React Flow also looks great at being able to help differentiate static/variable jumps with customisable lines too

• static jump = solid line
• variable jump = dashed line

[FaultyFunctions]

Thanks for bringing this up! I hadn't even considered it. Hmmm yeah this is going to be tricky. I would be inclined to try the second method, but what if they are setting and unsetting the variable to different nodes? Do we just match all of them? Do we track what the latest set is in that point in time? That would require Chatigami to actually run the Yadda code to find out and I don't want to build an runner lol

Another issue I see with the second approach is what about setting with functions? i.e. <<set $myNode = randomNode()>> It would be impossible then to know what node to show.

I'd rather not have the writer define the possible jumps, that seems very annoying and bothersome if I was the writer. Imagine the above scenario with the function. In every node that uses it you'd need to define __possibleJumps every single time, and update that on every node, if the function adds another node to its list.

I think this would be very time consuming for a nice-to-have feature. I'd rather just detect a variable jump, and indicate to the user that this node has a variable jump somehow (but not show exactly where). Unless there is another alternative, I think that would be the best path to take for the time being.

Lemme know if you can come up with alternative solutions, or what you think about just indicating that there is a variable jump in this node. Thanks!

[mycelia]

Second method sounds damn near impossible. I actually would like the option to define possible jumps if I wanted to/in certain situations, but not every time.
Having something to show "there's a variable jump" would be nice, like a little icon. I like solid/dotted to show the difference in connections.

[FaultyFunctions]

What would the UX for this look like? Just another header tag you can enter? Would it have a special section if a variable jump is detected? Or would you define it directly in the code with a comment tag? Or something else?

[heygleeson]

I think the UX should be a new header tag that appears when a variable jump is detected in the node, an an empty array.

(As for previous examples of <<$var is randomNode()>>, <<jump $var>>, while this would be pretty irrelevant information to display anyway, it's good point nonetheless. Function logic exists outside of the yadda script and is therefore impossible to determine)

[FaultyFunctions]

I would like to implement this somehow, but need to think about it more when the systems are fleshed out a bit. Perhaps there is a more UX friendly way to go about this, but your suggestion is a good fallback IMO.