Narration not showing?

[chronoluminaire]

Hi Py'Tom. I'm having an irritating piece of misbehaviour with my NaNoRenO game. I've been writing my script straight into Ren'Py (the typing program I use takes away the intense irritation of having to enclose everything in double quotes), and I tried running it for the first time last night... and found that the dialogue all displays happily, but the narration is completely ignored! Only those script lines that are preceded by a character object display: the plaintext lines on their own just get skipped straight past!

Do you have any idea what might be going on here? I have a feeling it's something to do with the init blocks... The one line of narration in the Ren'Py demo script works fine. Any ideas?

[PyTom]

Do you have any idea what might be going on here? I have a feeling it's something to do with the init blocks... The one line of narration in the Ren'Py demo script works fine. Any ideas?

Hm... Are you setting the narrator variable to something else? All narration is routed through that, so if it's changed, then that could break things. (Although I would expect a big crash rather than a subtle thing like this.)

Styles could also probably cause this, but they'd have to be really pathalogical.

Other than that, I'd say I'd have to look at the script to see what's going on.

[chronoluminaire]

I've not changed the narrator variable, but I have tweaked the style of the say_window a bit (I'm using a slightly unconventional layout). I'm sure I can debug it and figure out quite what's going on, I just thought I'd see if anything obvious occurred to you. It also seems to trigger the same behaviour I normal see when I'm missing a background image, where previous contents of the say windoware left half-visible behind the current say window.

I might send you the script if I really can't figure it out myself.

[chronoluminaire]

D'oh. Tracked it down. You even provided me with a blatant clue which I totally failed to notice. However, it's possible others might also accidentally do what I accidentally did, so I'll post it here.

I wasn't deliberately modifying the narrator. However, I had unthinkingly named one Position, the position where the character narrating the story will be shown, as "narrator". Yes, of course this overwrote the internal "narrator" variable which speaks lines that are narrated. Since a Position object isn't that good at speaking, it was just skipping over all narration. Whoops. My fault entirely... sorry!

[PyTom]

I'm just glad you caught it.

Hm... maybe in the future, I should require that functions that are called by say or dialogue statements return None, so that I can return an error message when this happens.