Say I wanted each npc to have a friendship percentage. I want the value to max out at 100 and drop over time. How would I put an upper bound on friendship such that it doesn’t overflow to something above 100. I’m pretty new to this, sorry if this is a foolish question.
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That depends what language you are using. Is it TADS, or Inform 7, or Gruescript…? Or one of the other ones.
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The general pattern is pretty straightforward, it’s just something like this:
friendship = friendship + newFreiendship
if friendship > 100:
friendship = 100
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inform7 whoops. Forgot to include that.
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If you just want to track one friendship, something like this will work. If you want more than one you should make it a property of the thing being befriended (and then the every turn rule should become a loop over the things).
"Leaping into Friendship"
Laboratory is a room.
Friendship is a number that varies. Friendship is initially 0. [ Starting value. ]
Every turn:
If friendship > 0:
Now friendship is friendship - 1;
say "The current friendship is [friendship].".
To increase friendship by (N - a number):
Now friendship is friendship + N;
If friendship > 100:
Now friendship is 100;
Instead of jumping:
say "You jump into friendship!";
Increase friendship by 30;
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And if you want to track multiple friendships?
I’m trying to use this code but i keep getting this:
Problem. Before reading ‘Loyalty is a number that varies’, I already knew that ‘Loyalty’ is a nothing valued property, and it is too late to change now.
i want loyalty, or friendship, to be a property of every person in the game, except the player.
or even of the player as well, maybe. i could work that out, actually.
Please let me know what your existing code is that refers to Loyalty, 'cause I don’t know how one ends up with a nothing-valued property.
The thing you want is:
a person has a number called loyalty.
But like I said, before replacing it, what is it you have now?
The player would end up with a loyalty property with the above. If that’s an actual problem, you could do something like:
an NPC is a kind of person.
an NPC has a number called loyalty.
and then make your npcs as, well, npcs instead of persons. You could even re-parent the existing subkinds of person to NPC if you’re using them…
a man is a kind of NPC.
a woman is a kind of NPC.
an animal is a kind of NPC.
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so the line of code referring to loyalty is the fourth line in my program after “when play begins”
A person has a number called loyalty. Loyalty is a number that varies. Loyalty is initially 0.
that’s the line. Loyalty isn’t referred to anywhere else in the code until i can get it to work here.
ah, assuming you’re using 9.3/6M62 or 10.1, I think you got a word wrong when transcribing the error message. It does, sensibly, say numbers valued property.
anyway, to make a property, one wants
A person has a number called loyalty.
To make a global variable, one wants
Loyalty is a number that varies. Loyalty is initially 0.
You never want both of those: as you’ve seen, if you try it with the same identifier, it doesn’t work.
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awesome!
But now when i want to increase a character’s loyalty it gives me this:
**Problem.** In the sentence 'increment jack's loyalty', I was expecting to read a value, but instead found some text that I couldn't understand - 'mom's loyalty'.
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**Problem.** You wrote 'increment jack's loyalty', but 'jack's loyalty' is a value, not a place where a value is stored.
For example, if 'The tally is a number that varies.', then I can 'increment the tally', but I can't 'increment 37' - the number 37 is always what it is. Similarly, I can't 'increment the number of people'. Phrases like 'increment' work only on stored values, like values that vary, or table entries.
I was trying to match this phrase:
increment (jack's loyalty - a stored value) !
But I didn't recognise 'jack's loyalty'.
try loyalty of jack instead.
same response
sorry, I didn’t read your post closely enough. You don’t need a phrase to manipulate it. You can just say, e.g.,
now the loyalty of jack is 0;
increment the loyalty of jack;
decrease the loyalty of jack by 10;
Or if it’s a complicated calculation you could do something like:
To make (p - a person) more loyal:
[something, something] loyalty of p [something]
When you declare a phrase, the thing to the left of the hyphen is just an arbitrary name for a variable local to the phrase. jack's loyalty there means exactly as much as x would: it doesn’t inherently have anything to do with jack or with a loyalty property.
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