The Skein after two further turns of play. We did begin by going EAST into Longman's, initially following the right-hand thread of the old Skein, but then rather than typing INVENTORY as before, we tried to greet Thomas instead.The Skein therefore unbraids a third thread, diverging after EAST.
The bolder blue lines indicate the current thread of play.
Memoirs of India 12-14
Gallery
But the Skein is not only a recording angel, writing down everything that anybody ever does in the simulated world. When the mouse arrow pauses over a knot in the Skein, contextual buttons appear, allowing us to edit or annotate the Skein.In fact, the Skein does eventually discard long-disused lines of play, to keep the whole thing from becoming too huge, which is why there's a padlock button to protect against this and other accidental change.
When it comes time to publish the work, Inform can use the threads in the Skein to generate a written solution automatically.
The single most useful feature of the Skein, however, is that double-clicking on any knot makes Inform automatically restart the game and run through to that position of play, typing in whatever commands are needed. Here we double-clicked the GIVE MANUSCRIPT TO THOMAS knot, and Inform correctly keyed in the three commands of that thread in the Skein.As before, the italicised blue commands are the ones typed automatically by Inform. The game is now waiting for the player to type the next command at the keyboard, and it will appear in black: it will of course be added to the Skein and thus lengthen or branch away from the current thread.
