Obtain list of all story segments?

[mttkay]

I use inkgd as the story engine behind a text adventure game I'm making. Players follow ink paths and choices to navigate between screens (locations, dialog etc.).

As a developer, I need the ability to jump straight to a particular screen when starting the game since I can't possibly follow the actual path to reach a screen that may only be reachable mid-game. To that end, I want to write a Godot panel that enumerates all paths, and an input box that allows me to filter down available paths. Clicking a path would then send me straight to that path via InkPlayer#choose_path.

The problem I am facing is that I couldn't find a good way to enumerate all possible paths. IIUC InkPlayer operates lazily: while it parses the ink JSON, it starts with a start node or pointer, then as the story progresses, it follows these links, but it does not appear to have an upfront concept of "this is the scene graph", am I wrong? (Godot's crummy debugger isn't particularly useful in helping me understand this.)

One idea I had was to parse the Ink JSON and detect diverts since they tend to point to key story path segments. Looking at the JSON format though, it's not easily interpreted. A scene element is an array of text fragments, ink codes/metadata etc. and it's hard to say what is even a path segment (for example, Ink functions and constants appear adjacent to ordinary segments in the scene JSON and are not clearly identified as such.) It's messy.

A simple alternative could of course be to just type in the desired path, however, since path names can be long and nested (think: game_act2.location1.screen_5) this is really tedious and error prone. It would be so much nicer to have a pre-populated list to choose from.

Any ideas how to go about that? Is there an object in inkgd that holds the entire scene graph and that I could process recursively to poke out path segments? 🤔

[mttkay]

I took a stab at parsing the JSON generated by Inky and poke out diverts as an approximation of "which scenes/knots exists I can reach as a player". This was easier than I originally thought and so far seems to work well for me.

I thought I'd share the code in case anyone is looking to solve the same problem:

	func _collect_diverts(json_el, diverts: Set):
		match json_el:
			{"->": var divert, ..}:
				if not (divert.begins_with(".") or divert.begins_with("$")):
					diverts.add(divert)
			{..}:
				for k in json_el.keys():
					_collect_diverts(json_el[k], diverts)
			[..]:
				for el in json_el:
					_collect_diverts(el, diverts)

The root json_el here should be the document root as obtain via JSON.parse.

I filter out diverts that Ink generates itself, because they have cryptic names that are useless for manual navigation.

This implementation uses a hand-rolled Set type because otherwise it will insert duplicates. You can use Array as well, but then you'll have to filter out duplicates yourself.