My feature request is a little odd, but hey, maybe it’ll resonate.
Imagine a scene where the heroine needs to get from point A to point G. She can get there A-B-C-G or A-D-E-G. For example, she’s captured by bad guys and can either be A) tied to a chair, which will have her break said chair to get free or B) Chained to a wall, which will require her to use a bad guy to get the keys to the chains to get free. Both options work, and both further the story. As I’m writing, I write both because I can’t really decide which one I like better.
I’d love the option to mark a section within a scene file as Verion 1 or Version 2. Then when I review the sections later, I would be able to toggle the scene file from Version 1 to Version 2. This toggling would swap out the version 1 highlighted sections for the version 2 highlighted sections.
I don’t want to use two separate scene files because the highlighted section would only be a paragraph at most and it seems a little odd to break it up like that. Right now I’m just putting Version 2 in the document notes and dealing with it that way, but I thought maybe this could be a helpful feature for others as well.
Thanks for listening, whether you agree with my suggestion or not and thanks for Scrivener in general. If I haven’t explained myself well enough, please let me know.
I would just break it into separate sections, myself–even though the paragraph chunk may be a much smaller document than most of your other sections in the binder, it seems ideal for what you’re wanting to do, since you can easily then select different configurations to read as a Scrivenings session and can even pull different sets of documents together to save as collections. Likewise it would be incredibly easy to swap out various versions when you want to compile, either via the “include in compile” checkbox or by compiling specific collections. Separate documents for the versions also allows you to give them distinct synopses, notes, references, keywords, etc. which you may find helpful as your story grows. Depending how “Choose Your Own Adventure” you really get, you can also use Scrivener links (either within the document or in the reference section) to connect the different scene options.
If that really doesn’t appeal to you at all, though, you could try using snapshots for this. Write the scene one way, take a snapshot and title it Version 1 (or something more explanatory about what it actually is), then rewrite the scene in the same document for the Version 2 style and take another snapshot of that. Roll back to version 1 when you want to see that, and then roll back to version 2 when you want that one. It’s not a toggle, but it’s roughly the same idea; both are part of the same document and you only see one at a time. (Though you do have the option of comparing the snapshots, which might be of interest.)
At the moment I’m doing some pre-production for a CYOA-style novel. After playing around a bit with Scrivener and Scrivener links I noticed that it is a good idea to split everything into linked segments and use keywords to tag the various storylines inside the CYOA. Some sections only get one or two keywords, others might end up with 30 or more.
If you gor for the electronic publisching route the length of each section shouldn’t matter at all. When I switch to a collection made from a keyword, I can get a fairly good idea of the flow of each storyline. Unless you don’t plan on ten thousands of sections Scrivener should be able to handle that kind of workflow.
My current (non-CYOA) novel consists of roughly 300 sections with 150k words in the draft folder and another 500 elements for characters, notes, alternate text versions etc. Even with that number of elements Scrivener is still very responsive on my Mac mini. I hope that my CYOA novel can be done with 1k to 1.5k sections and 500k words in the end.
As a visual thinker my biggest problem is that Scrivener can’t show the outline of a CYOA as concept map or even a mind map with links to get an overview of the different branches of the story. However I doubt Scrivener will get any of these features ever. I’m almost tempted to install Xcode and try to write a small tool that can parse project files for that purpose.
You wouldn’t even need Xcode for that. Link structure is maintained with the ##.links files, which are very straightforward XML. These use ID numbers which you’d need to get from the master .scrivx file, which is again XML. So any language with a decent XML library should be able to easily model the link condition of a project. It would depend upon your method of working, but it may not be very neat! One of the things that makes Scrivener slightly different from your typical “mind map” or diagramming application is that that References pane can store as many links as you want very easily, and Scrivener Links within the document generate back-references as well. So a person heavily linking their project up would likely end up with something more along the lines of a dropped bowl of spaghetti, rather than a neat and tidy flowchart. Most diagrams and mind mapping style programs do not have 1,000 data nodes either!
What would work, in my opinion, is a Tinderbox style In/Out view. Basically a display that showed all inbound links on the left, the data node (binder item) in the middle, as a small representational icon, and then all output links on the right. Double-click on them to traverse. This method lets you display arbitrarily dense networks of links without a mind-numbing spray of link lines on a flat 2-d map upon which all data nodes are equal.
[size=120]Performance[/size]
Shouldn’t be a problem. The user manual has roughly 900 items in it, 840 of which are in the Draft folder, which has about 200k words of material. I’m using a four year old Macbook Pro some times, and a MacBook Air other times (neither of which are high performers in modern terms), and never have any issues with performance, even when viewing large views of items, like search results that include the entire project and large Scrivenings sessions (chapter is about as large as I go). One thing that can slow it down is very large lists in the outliner with a sorted column. It takes a while to sort (~15 seconds for the entire draft of 840 items), which means editing in a sorted outliner is out of the question unless you wish to wait 15 seconds after every edit.
