Twine alert!


Emerging technology is exciting, and also full of challenges. Feb 1, 2017, with no advance warning to users, Twine pushed a new version, 2.1 to all, that broke the platform for users who'd already created versions in the previous version, 2.0.11 that we've been using for our Saturday series. What happens, as I discovered Friday evening prior to the next day's class, was you can open your project home page and see your scripting, but if you try to:

play your project
publish to file
add a new project

you get an error message at the top of your screen:

"An error occurred while publishing your story. ()"

Digging around in the Twine user forum, it seems every time Twine updates a version, this happens to users! Essentially what seems to be happening is in the background on your computer, from the first time you use Twine, it creates a folder in a Twine folder within your computer's registry architecture that is compatible ONLY with the current version of Twine. Therefore, when a new version is pushed (and you don't get a choice to decline), this creates a conflict on your computer and causes Twine to give you the error message. When you open the release notes for 2.1 from the first link in this blog post, they do then reveal that you can still access the url to the previous 2.0.11 version: twinery.org/2.0.11/#stories. I was able to access and play my projects built using that version on my PC. However, this fix wasn't totally reliable on the shared UVa PCs, and in fact some of the UVa PCs worked fine using the new 2.1 version, which tells me how your computer is configured makes a big difference and how Twine creates it's folders once you access it differs because of this. Wow...

So, the upshot is that at our next class session, we are lucky enough to have PCs where Twine was never used. Being "naive", I assume the new Twine version, 2.1 should work just fine. And if you've never accessed Twine from your home computer, it should be fine, too, that is, until Twine unexpectedly upgrades. I am in the process of drafting a post to this most recent Twine user forum thread, because simply put, I cannot recommend use of this wonderful platform in the school system; it just is not accessible enough to teachers who are not the PC admins, even if you do want to get into the business of monkeying with your computer's registry folders to figure out which one to delete! I'll let you know the response I get and my own luck trying to fix this on my own laptop.