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Silly Question from a Newbie

A topic by DbbMajor created 16 days ago Views: 101 Replies: 2
Viewing posts 1 to 2
(+4)

First and foremost, huge thanks to Internet Janitor for making Decker, and likewise to the small, but tight community who use it to make awesome stuff. I still don't have any idea what I'm doing, but reading through some of you all's community posts has been very insightful!

From what I understand, many of Decker's limitations are very intentional. I opened the software today, and as I was poking around, I found myself wondering if there was any way to organize cards into sub-decks or folders of some sort for the different parts of a project, and as far as I can tell, there is not. This was on my mind, because I would eventually like to put an interactive story together using Decker, and I think navigating a project would be easier if I was able to have a folder for each chapter and organize a deck that way. My apologies if something like this is already possible and I just missed it 馃槄

Developer(+3)

Welcome to the Decker community!

There isn't currently any mechanism for visually grouping sets of cards within a deck while editing.

If you're comfortable with programming, you might be able to achieve the project structure you describe by writing pieces of a large game as separate decks and then using a Lilt script to glue the pieces together; Lilt has most of the same scripting interfaces as Decker itself and can also copy and paste cards, widgets, and other resources between decks. I can provide more detailed examples if needed.

From a scripting perspective it's fairly easy to write queries that find cards based on a naming convention. For example, in Valentine-er all the cards containing border designs use a "back_" prefix in their names, and the script which populates the list of options does essentially:

select where key like "back_*" from deck.cards

If you happen to remember the names of cards within a project, you can also use the Listener to quickly navigate to them via the keyboard like so:


Does any of that help?

(+4)

Hi, Internet Janitor! Thanks so much for giving such a detailed response to my post. I am not at all familiar with scripting/coding, but I understand what you're saying, and your response is very insightful. Perhaps a lofty goal, but as I become more proficient with using Decker's more surface level functionalities, I intend on learning how to use the scripting language you've crafted for it. I hope that, in time, you'll be willing to answer more questions that arise for me!