#macros

The Leap

The 100% Good Twine SugarCube Guide!

The 100% Good Twine SugarCube Guide is a coding guide for the SugarCube format of Twine. It is meant as an alternative to the SugarCube documentation, with further explanations, interactive examples, and organised by difficulty. The goal of this guide is to make the learning curve for new SugarCube user less steep, and provide a comprehensive and wide look over the format.

VIEW / DOWNLOAD THE GUIDE!!!!

The Guide is compartmentalised in (currently) four categories:

THE BASICS or the absolute basics to start with SugarCube. No need for extra knowledge. Just the base needed to make something.

THE BASICS + adding interactivity, and creating a fully rounded IF game May require a bit of CSS knowledge (formatting rules)

INTERMEDIATE MODE adding more customisation and complex code Will probably require some CSS knowledge, and maybe some JavaScript

ADVANCE USE the most complex macros and APIs Will surely require some JavaScript/jQuery knowledge

Note: The Advanced Use includes all the APIs, macros, and methods not covered by the previous categories. This includes code requiring very advance knowledge of JavaScript/jQuery to be used properly.

Each category explains many aspects of the format, tailored to a specific level of the user. More simpler explanations and examples are available in earlier chapters, compared to the later ones.

If something is unclear, you found a mistake, you would like more examples in the guide, or would like a feature covered, let me know!

The Guide currently covers all macros (as of SugarCube v.2.37.3), all functions and methods, and APIs. It touches upon the use of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery, when relevant. It also discusses aspects of accessibility.

The Guides also provides a list of further resources, for the different coding languages.

The Guide is available in a downloadable form for offline view:

HTML file that can be opened in Twine

.tw file that can be opened in Twine

source code, separating the chapters, .js and .css files

GITHUB REPO | RAISE AN ISSUE | TWINE RESOURCES TWEEGO | TEMPLATES | CSCRIPT 2 SG GUIDE

Twine® is an “an open-source tool for telling interactive, non-linear stories” originally created by Chris Klimas maintained in several different repositories (Twinery.org). Twine is also a registered trademark of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation.

SugarCube is a free (gratis and libre) coding format for Twine/Twee created and maintained by TME.

VIEW / DOWNLOAD THE GUIDE!!!!

As of this release (v2.0.0), it is up to date with the version 2.37.3. If you are looking for the guide covering SugarCube 2.36.1, you can find it on my GitHub.

So.

This post is about food and eating, in case you want to just scroll on by.

I'm a plus sized woman, perimenopausal, and I'm trying to keep from becoming plus-er and also I need to keep an eye on blood numbers for health reasons.

Ergo, I decided to start tracking my macros (I've food-logged before but only in a general way).

For the uninitiated, macros are protein/fat/carbs and some people group fiber into it. Mostly I needed to monitor my protein and fiber intake to make sure I was getting enough. I'm not trying to do low carb or keto-whatever, nor am I really trying to cut a massive amount of calories - although if you food log in any way you sort of end up managing calories at the same time.

It's been like...ten days, and friendos? I'm borderline shocked at the effect this is having on me.

After only a few days of getting like 130 g of protein and 50 g of fiber daily, it's like...someone reached into my brain, found the dial labeled "food noise" and turned it waaaaaaay down. I don't know how else to describe that phenomenon other than "food noise" and I suspect a lot of you will know what I mean. It's that niggling urge to eat something, the munchies, the thoughts that dwell on food, the hovering constantly around it.

It's just...gone.

I eat what I eat, choosing things with high protein and fiber, and then I just don't think about it anymore. No more sitting at my computer with my brain dwelling on how much I want some pretzels, or toast, or whatever else it wants. It's just QUIET in there. It's almost eerie. I crave nothing. I'm not boredom eating.

Like today, at my workplace on Fridays we get a free patio lunch of grill items (or salad bar if you prefer). I got a bbq pulled beef sandwich. It came with two sides, I got pasta salad and a bag of pretzels.

I ate the sandwich and about half the pretzels and I was just...done. I didn't want more. I feel like in the past I'd have gone on and eaten the pretzels anyway (pretzels are one of my favorite things) but today it was just "nah, I'm good."

I threw the pasta salad right in the trash.

Thoughts on specifics for anyone who's interested:

Protein is kind of That Girl of the moment for healthy eating so it's real easy to find higher-protein food items. They're putting extra protein in freaking everything. You can get high protein CHEERIOS ffs (I don't recommend them). This is all fine but protein sources are plentiful among regular foods. Meat, dairy, beans, plant based proteins, are easy to eat and plentiful.

I'm a big fan of the Oikos Triple Zero yogurt. It is NOT a Greek yogurt but it has like 15 grams of protein per container and it's very tasty. I like to take a cup of the vanilla one, add some powdered peanut butter + cocoa (PB2 powder, available in most stores) with a splash of milk for stirring, and some chopped walnuts. Chia seeds are another good addition (let them plump in the fridge before eating).

If you're logging anything for any reason a kitchen scale is your best friend.

One of the best bits of nutritionist advice I ever got is "add, don't subtract." Don't think about cutting foods from your diet. Think about adding more foods that will benefit you. Don't cut carbs, add vegetables. Don't cut sugar, add fiber. By adding beneficial things, you will naturally have less capacity and desire for the things you'd like to eat less of. And it will not feel restrictive.

Do not take advice from any online nutrition or health coach on instagram who is selling something (with the possible exception of if they have a cookbook, especially if the same recipes are also on their social media). The online coaches LOVE to get engagement with posts about how grapes are bad, actually and you shouldn't feed kids bananas (two actual real life takes I've seen - because sure, Americans are unhealthy because we just eat too many darned grapes and bananas, sure, that's it).

The app I'm using to track is called MacrosFirst and it's great. You can scan anything to add it, or search. You can set it to your own goals and what you want to track.

If you have never tried to make a macro before, or don't know what they even are, FFXIV has the ability for you to assign a number of commands that will run in sequence at the push of a button. If you've seen a cute little saying from your healer announcing a res to you, or seen a sudden burst of text resulting in ASCII art in your chat window, that's probably someone's macro at work.

I won't tell you how to make macros in general, nor explore the long list of macro commands available here. The FFXIV console games wiki has a page that'll get you started. For those of you who are already familiar with macros, allow me to introduce to you a useful pattern.

The swap macro.

I use this macro specifically as a controller player to change from my combat setup to a quick-use secondary cross hotbar that holds a bunch of buttons that I need rapid, but not continuous, access to. In my case, I use this swap macro to help out in a specific fight, but you can also use it to squeeze one more hotbar's worth of buttons out of the default interface.

First, you should clear a hotbar for use. For this, I like to use one of the class hotbars. Once you have a job stone, there is typically no reason to ever use the class, but each class has its own hotbars separate from their associated job. This makes the class hotbars ideal for clearing out, and putting some extra functionality into.

To make this work, you will be working with three hotbars total. The main hotbar, the hotbar you want to swap it out with, and an additional third hotbar that serves as temporary storage.

For the purposes of this example, I will be swapping PLD cross hotbar 1 with GLA cross hotbar 1.

PLD cross hotbar 1 needs no modification for this to work, and it's my primary combat hotbar, seen here:

GLA cross hotbar 1 needs set up first. The easy way to do this is just to go to PLD cross hotbar 1, and then remove your job stone. With the job stone removed, you are free to modify it how you see fit. I went ahead and populated it with the buttons I wanted to put in it, as below:

GLA cross hotbar 2 needs to be empty. With the job stone still removed, I just swapped to cross hotbar 2, and removed all the buttons I found there:

With your hotbars now setup, go ahead and put your job stone back, and now at last we can make our macro.

The macro is very straightforward. You can just copy and paste the following into the macro editor box, changing pld and gla for the job/class hotbars you'll be swapping:

/crosshotbar copy pld 1 gla 2 /crosshotbar copy gla 1 pld 1 /crosshotbar copy gla 2 gla 1

And here's what that should look like in game:

Here's what this is doing.

First, it copes the pld 1 cross hotbar into the currently empty gla 2 cross hotbar. This is just a button for button swap, so now gla2 will look exactly like pld 1. The gla 2 cross hotbar is only there for storage, however. This is essentially backing up our current pld 1 cross hotbar configuration.

Next, we copy cross hotbar gla 1 into cross hotbar pld 1. This is the swap - now all the buttons on the pld 1 cross hotbar will be replaced with the ones we staged in cross hotbar gla 1. But we're not done yet!

The last thing we do is we copy gla 2 into gla 1. Remember, gla 2 is where we backed up pld 1.

Now at this point, the swap is complete. And because of the order in which we copied the cross hotbars, if you hit the exact same macro again, it will execute the same steps, and restore your starting state almost exactly. The only change will be that cross hotbar gla 2 will now have some buttons in it - whatever was last swapped. This is not a problem, and the swap will continue to work, but if you need the gla 2 cross hotbar for some other purpose, this swap macro will mess up whatever you use it for besides swapping.

This gets you an extra 'free' hotbar that you would otherwise not have access to. You can make a large number of swap macros, and use them to swap out specific buttons at any time. This can be used to make expanding menu bars and give you some extra buttons to play around with.