Exporting

Export makes one of two things, and the dialog asks which.

A project copy

What export always made: a folder that opens in the editor, with .ripple/ included, for handing to a translator or for keeping. It is the project with its media resolved — a picture the prose points at from outside the project lands in media/external/ — and zipping it or leaving the media out are switches on the dialog.

Include media is three switches, one each for images, videos and audio. A story’s music is the heaviest thing in the folder and the one most likely to be somebody else’s to license, so sending a translator the story and keeping the score is the ordinary case. With a kind off, its files are listed and left behind, and the passages, boards and soundscapes still point where they would have been, so they can be put back later.

A campaign

The story compiled down to a bundle a runtime plays with no editor anywhere near it. It is not a rearranged copy of the project: every reference has been resolved ahead of time, every board’s evaluation order decided, every passage’s languages flattened into one file, and everything only an editor cares about thrown away.

• Directorycampaign/

  • campaign.json the manifest
  • Directoryboards/

    • the_gates.board.json
  • Directorypassages/

    • reaching_the_gates.passage.json every language, in one file
  • Directorycomponents/

    • goblin.component.json
  • Directoryscripts/

    • damage.py
  • Directorysoundscapes/

    • tavern.soundscape.json every clip’s file as a media index
  • Directorymedia/

    • Directoryart/

      • map.png
    • Directorymusic/

      • tavern.ogg

What a compiled campaign gets right that a copy of the project could not:

• Only the languages the project has. A language you switched off stays in your project and does not ship.
• Only the media the project actually holds. A picture a passage or a component points at but does not have is left out rather than travelling as a name nothing can open. The export already told you about these in Messages; now what it produces agrees with what it said.
• A macro is copied into whatever calls it. Nothing of a macro reaches the bundle: each call is spliced into the board that made it, so a runtime never has to know what a macro is, and two calls are two copies.
• The Python does not travel inside the prose. Each passage’s snippets are lifted into a table of their own, with a marker left where each one was, so a program playing the campaign puts the answers in by number and never has to know what Markdown is.
• Sound is a table, and the runtime plays none of it. A Narration node names its soundscape by index into soundscapes/; the runtime decides which one is in force and tells its host, which renders it with whatever it has. The command-line player prints a line per change and hears nothing, and that is conforming.
• A node’s metadata travels with it, under metadata on the node, for whatever plays the campaign to read. The runtime hands it to the host on the node’s turn and never looks inside.

The lifting is what makes delivering the prose in another format possible at all. It is also why a campaign exported by an earlier version will not play in this one — it says so by name, and exporting it again from the project is one click. A saved game is unaffected.

The bundle format is a published contract, and the runtime that plays it — ripple_runtime — is pure Dart with no Flutter in it. A command-line player built from it plays a campaign in a terminal with neither Flutter nor Dart installed, which is how the claim is checked.

Passages as HTML

Below the line in the export dialog — the controls above it decide what travels, the ones below decide what the prose becomes — a campaign can have every passage written out as an HTML fragment per language, ready to drop into a page. The editor and the play view stay Markdown; this is for whatever reads the campaign next.

An export profile names the class each kind of element gets. A paragraph, a heading, emphasis, a link, a table cell, a Python snippet — each can carry a class of your choosing, so the fragments fit a stylesheet you already have. Picking HTML opens the profile beside the export controls: each kind of thing on the left, with the Markdown it stands for on a tooltip, and a field for its class on the right, saved as you type. Nothing assigned means no attribute at all.

A profile is a file in the project, .ripple/export/<name>.profile.json, committed with the story so a build reproduces it, and one profile serves as many exports as you like.

Stripping media and links

Two switches, and both work on a project copy as well as a campaign:

• Strip media takes embedded pictures, videos and audio out of the prose, for a reader that cannot show them — one child switch per kind.
• Strip links unwraps a link to its words.

A link to a picture is a picture, not a link, and answers to the first switch. Neither changes what travels beside the passages — that is still Include media — and a strip for a kind that is not in the export is disabled, since there is nothing to strip; it comes back as it was when the kind does.