Part 6: Unfold Studio extensions to Ink

Unfold Studio currently runs on Ink 0.8.2, with a few customizations.

Include

Unfold Studio handles INCLUDE a bit differently from Ink. For one thing, you can only include stories that are public or shared (even if they are your own), and stories are included by their ID, not a filename.

The rules for inclusion are also different. In regular Ink, defining the same knot or variable in two stories which are included together results in an error. In Unfold Studio, knots and variables defined in included stories are ignored if they are already defined in the including story. When you INCLUDE a story, only its knots and variables are included. Any text or redirects outside of a knot are not included. This makes it possible to write substories which work on their own, and which can also be included in larger stories.

This behavior is achieved through a preprocessing layer story code goes through before being parsed by Ink.

External functions

Unfold Studio provides some functions which are not avialable in standard Ink. ln(x) and log2(x) provide support for logarithms. random() returns a random float between 0 and 1. random_integer(low, high) returns a random integer at least low but less than high. And random_gaussian(mean, std) returns a Gaussian (normal) random number with mean mean and standard deviation std.

Styling

Stories can use tags to style content. Currently, only text messages are supported:

=== texting ===
What's up? # text-them
nm. U? # text-me

Clearing the output

Some stories might need to clear the output history. You can do this with the #clear tag.

Now you see it.
+ And now...
   you don't #clear