5 replies to this topic

[weimer]

What a lovely tutorial. Reading it made it clear to me that the CHAIN syntax is unnecessairly restrictive. Time to remedy that.

[weimer]

I am uploading a new version of WeiDU that should compress Blue's initial tutorial segment into a single action. Behold the new power of CHAIN:

// CHAIN example: Adapted from Blue's Tutorial

BEGIN ~BBLUE~ // We are in a banter file, specifically, the banter file for the NPC Blue.

CHAIN IF ~InParty("Jan")  // Is the NPC Blue wants to talk to in the party?
See("Jan")  // Can she SEE the NPC?
!StateCheck("Jan",STATE_SLEEPING)  // Is the NPC conscious?
Global("JanBlueTalk","LOCALS",0)~ THEN 
BBLUE BlueJanBanterChain
  ~Agh! What am I doing in a computer game? I should never have eaten that leftover pizza.~  // Blue should say this.
DO ~SetGlobal("JanBlueTalk","LOCALS",1)~ // Okay, make sure this talk won't happen again, and let's see the NPC's reply.
== BJAN
~Have a turnip! It'll make you feel better. The same thing happened to my third-cousin-twice-removed-once-by-marriage Philroy waaaaay back just two weeks ago -~  // We already know who's replying here, so no need to specify.
== BBLUE  // Okay, now we want Blue to say something, so we go back to her banter file.
~And to make things worse, I'm stuck in a banter with HIM! Give me a sentence that's less than four words long, please?~  // And that's what she says.
== BJAN  // Alright, back to Jan.
~What are you talking about?~  // That's what he says.
== BBLUE 
~Argh! That's FIVE words, FIVE!~  // Blue gives her ending line.
EXIT

The upshot is that you can now have initial conditions for CHAIN, use EXIT or COPY_TRANS instead of END file label, and you can put DO actions in the middle. You can also put actions in the middle of interject and I_C_T now.

This is yet another installment in my continuing quest to remove all syntax from WeiDU and just have it interpret text files of text as dialogues. :-) Would you believe that I once seriously considered a variant of D files where tabbing levels would indicate whether the text was to be spoken by the NPC or said in reply by the PC? The sad part is, it's not a half-bad idea.

The usual extensive local testing (hey, at least five minutes this time) did not reveal any errors. Compton has 2 hours from the time he reads this message to find at least one that I have introduced. :-)