| When I was back in elementary school, a friend thought up this brilliant idea that we called "foldermazes", which were basically choose your own adventure games, but the way you chose your adventure was by selecting which folder to go down. I was and still am fascinated by just how brilliant of an idea it was! Of course there were problems. One that I recall was that I didn't want to have to maintain k^n separate branches of story, so I'd prune off incorrect branches quickly by having your character die or something. :) We hit the maximum depth for folders very quickly, so I came up with the idea of having a routing table at the base, which was just a single folder with folders labeled 1-10000 inside it. The idea was that you'd get to maximum depth, and then get a number to go into the routing table and continue the adventure. The hope was that there were so many folders within the routing table that it'd be impossible to guess a correct path by chance. (And of course, all the invalid folders had a message like "stop trying to cheat, you cheater! YOUR CHARACTER DIES INSTANTLY!" Remember... 5th grade. :)) I remember working frantically on a "foldermaze" at home for hours, then attempting to put it on a floppy disk. Turns out that is not the sort of operation Windows 95 was optimized for at all - it took hours. (The maze had tens of thousands of folders, most inside the routing table.) Then after a certain point it just failed with "disk full". This really stumped me as a 5th grader. How could the disk be full? Inspecting the properties of my foldermaze showed that it took up 0MB! Far less than the 1.44MB offered by the floppy... Eventually I pieced together that folders must take up some marginal amount of space more than 0. The property inspector was lying to me! That was very surprising as a kid. Anyways, this seems like what we did, but way more cool. :) |
You could always merge storylines later on by symlinking them to the same place!
(Maybe not on Windows).