Banner display issues

Authoring TADS
1

<.p>I’m playing around with banners, and I’ve hit a snag with the display options: I can only figure out how to make bannerSay() display a single string.

The goal was the have the banner serve as a status window displaying several parameters stored as properties in the player character, so for instance:

player: Actor  
    location = startRoom
    LV = 1
    EXP = 0
    HP = 150
    MaxHP = 150
;

startRoom: Room 'Starting Room'
    "This is the start room. "
;

The information that I’d wish to display on the banner would be, if I could use double quoted strings, something like this:

[code]statusWindow: CustomBannerWindow
bannerArgs = [nil, BannerAfter, statuslineBanner, BannerTypeText,
BannerAlignRight, 10, BannerSizeAbsolute, BannerStyleBorder]

currentContents = stats
stats 
{
    "LV : <<player.LV>>
    <.p>HP : <<player.HP>>/<<player.MaxHP>>
    <.p>EXP : <<player.EXP>>/100 ";
}

;[/code]

So that the end result would look like this:

But of course, I can’t use a double quoted string. I can’t even figure out how to use more than a single-quoted string or property. I’ve found that several other things meant for single-quoted strings have ways to insert double-quoted ones instead ( like using {:" "} insteadof ’ ’ for EventLists). Is there some equivalent here, or am I out of luck?

2

I’ve never used banners, but if you’ve updated to T3.1, the << >> syntax can be used in single-quoted strings.

3

If you’re just looking to replace the normal status line behavior, you can override statusLine’s showStatusHtml method.

modify statusLine
	showStatusHtml() {
		"LV: <<player.LV>><br>";
		"HP: <<player.HP>>/<<player.MaxHP>><br>";
		"EXP: <<player.EXP>>/100 <br>";
	}
;

You lose the default information - location, score, exits list - but you can add that back in easily enough if you want it.

4

Thank you. I followed Jim Aikin’s suggestion above and upgraded to 3.1, that basically solved all my problems.