How would you prefer for files to be organised in Parchment?

As I’m working on the next major version of Parchment, I’ll be changing how user files (saves, transcripts, etc) will be organised. As well as this being how they’ll be organised in browser storage, once Dropbox support is added this is how they’d be directly organised in a Parchment folder within Dropbox. I can think of a few options, and would like to get the community’s feedback.

  • Unstructured - all files for all games in a single folder
  • Per-game folders - each game would have its own folder (files for advent.z5 would go in advent/, but probably so would files for advent.ulx…)
  • Mixed - savefiles and transcripts would be per-game, but data files would be common
  • Something else?
0 voters

I think that having per-game folders would probably be nice, but it could make things tricky for the very rarely used feature of cross-game data files. But then, it would also prevent games from overwriting each others’ files, and I intend to make it possible to move files between folders.

7 Likes

Will any updates with this also include the functionality for saving data files on Z-machine without a prompt?

2 Likes

That’s pretty much an entirely separate issue.

Though while we’re adding Glk extensions, perhaps it would be useful to have a new function which allows for a suggestion to be made for the file prompt? That could be useful for more than just Z-Machine implementers.

3 Likes

This would be very welcome – I’m generally strongly in favor of per-game folders as a safer default, but I wouldn’t want to sacrifice functionality entirely.

Another note: you mention Dropbox integration (good) but if at all possible, I’d also like to have the option to directly import and export files (not just move them around within browser storage) without being tied to Dropbox. The free Dropbox plan is limited to three devices at a time, which makes it a huge hassle if you regularly use more than that.

3 Likes

Yeah I’m thinking of having a file browser with upload/download features.

Also I’ve been saying Dropbox, but other cloud services could be an option too. I’ll look into GDrive at least.

4 Likes

Another question: should autosaves also be cloud synced, or be particular to the device?

  • Yes, cloud sync
  • No, autosaves should be per-device
0 voters
5 Likes