Is there any likelihood of a tracked changes feature being added to Twine?

Question

My company uses Twine 2 as a storyboarding tool to create branching narratives, but it's not entirely suitable for our process as our editors need to be able to track text changes they make, and send those changes back to the writers for approval, rejection or discussion (as one can with Microsoft Word files). We don't publish to HTML, as the Twine file is only used in the development stage and we have different software for publishing.

I've looked at the Illume proofing format and contacted its creator, but there's no way to get the edited content from the proofing format back into the Twine file itself short of copy-pasting every passage.
Additionally, Twine 1's RTF/Twee export feature is a bit too messy and unreliable for us to use, I think.

Is there any likelihood that tracked changes will be added to Twine, or is there any kind of workaround in existence?

Answer 1

Have you considered a version control system like git?

I'm not at all involved with Twine development but I know that making Twine easier to work on in groups has been a goal for a long time, but little progress has been made, so I wouldn't count on any official support soon.

Comments

We have, and wikis, but unfortunately our team is not 100% tech savvy and the learning curve might make moving to such a system not worth it for my company.

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Do you happen to know who is involved with Twine development? Would love to just suggest it as a feature for the future if there are currently no similar options.

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You can suggest features via Twine's issue tracker. I would honestly expect a solution to be better vcs integration and support, not a reinvention of the wheel. Tech-savvy or not, using git or similar through one of the many GUIs or websites should not take more than a crash course, I'd imagine, just for basic forking and pull requests, which will be most, if not all, of what you need. 

I would be surprised if Twine tried to roll its own half-baked vcs instead of just making integration easier. @HiEv is right that CLI compilers are way easier to integrate with vcs than Twine 2, and he's also right that 90% of everything your company needs to do, including a lot the vcs stuff, could be done in batch files and on a website like github or bitbucket. 

Also, vcs is always worth it imo, probably especially for companies, at least if you're doing stuff with tech and writing code to some extent. If you aren't you might be better served by some sort of mind-mapping or flowchart application. 

Answer 2

Twee seems like your best option.  You don't need to use Twine 1, you could use Illume with Twine 2 to output to Twee format, or even use Tweego to convert back-and-forth between Twee and HTML (since it can decompile HTML into Twee and compile Twee into HTML).  Tweego would even let you compile multiple separate Twee files into a single HTML file that could be imported into Twine 2.

So, I'd recommend only editing the Twee files, and then convert to HTML and import that into Twine when necessary.  A batch (.bat) file could be set up to make this take just a few clicks.

This would make it easy to use any version control system with the Twee files, like Git, to track the changes.

Hope that helps!  :-)