To Clear the Screen or not to Clear the Screen, that is the question

[David-Jareth-Bowie]

Testing my game, I see blocks of text, which do need to occur to progress the story (there is no way around this for authenticity sake). However, a part of me feels it would look better if it disappeared, as in Clear the Screen script. While a part of me thinks it would be helpful to stay. But it just looks odd with so much text cluttering.

Is there a middle ground to make what ever most recently pops up show at the top, but you can always scroll up past that to see previous screens/text? At times I may very well want to clear the screen entirely, but looking for a balance and suggestions. Thank you.

[KVonGit]

You could, but you'd have to do all that using HTML, CSS, and JS, coding all that yourself.

In example, to have a way to delete certain bits of text each turn, you could use HTML elements with a class, and use a turn script to hide those bits of text using JavaScript.

This kitchen is currently under construction.<div class="hide-me">

This will disappear when the page changes.</div> This text will NOT disappear.<div class="hide-me"> This text WILL disappear!</div>

This text will remain.

Then, create a turn script (and be sure it is enabled):

JS.eval ("$('.hide-me').hide();")

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There is also a text processor trick in Quest you might find helpful.

Anywhere in the text, we can use {once:} like this: {once:This will only print once.}

I usually wrap the line breaks in it, too, like:

This kitchen is under construction.{once:

This will only print once.}

[KVonGit]

I just discovered an old trick to create an output section to hide text whenever we please, using Quest functions.

Here's an example script. (I tested this in a "before entering room for the first time" script, but we can do this in whatever script(s) we want.)

      // Start a new output section
      // The function will return the name of the section
      // We need to store the section name as an attribute, for later use
      // We'll store this data in a "section_to_delete" attribute on the 'lounge' object
      lounge.section_to_delete = StartNewOutputSection()
      // Now, we can print whatever we want to be removed
      msg ("This message will self-destruct!")
      // Whenever we are done printing text, end the output section
      // (We are using the attribute we created to store the section name)
      EndOutputSection (lounge.section_to_delete)
      // We want this text gone after this turn
      // Use a turn timeout, set to 1 turn
      SetTurnTimeout (1) {
        // Hide the output section, using the attribute we created for this purpose
        HideOutputSection (lounge.section_to_delete)
      }

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Important

Any text that prints in between the call to to StartNewOutputSection and EndOutputSection will be hidden when HideOutputSection is called to hide that section.