mystery functions

[Betelgeuse]

A thread for functions that you can't understand what they want.

armGetHitPoints
it wants an number but I can't find what it wants, it doesn't want a UNID or even the same thing as armGetName

Can someone find out what it needs or if it is just a function that crashes the game (not used in the xml)

[george moromisato]

It's a bug, unfortunately.

armGetHitPoints takes the same parameter as armGetName (a pointer returned by objGetArmorType)

Unfortunately, there is a bug in armGetHitPoints and it crashes no matter what you pass in.

p.s.: In a future version I want to change all these arm* functions to take an UNID (which makes more sense).

[Betelgeuse]

more questions
fncHelp: can you make your own strings that this will return for custom made function?
errblock: How are errors handled in transcendence and how does that relate to this function?
iserror: same as above.

atm*: I am guessing that these relate to atoms but I am not sure how.

set: Ok I have no experience with programming in Lisp.
subst: same as above.

[Betelgeuse]

link: hmm can't get anything to work in the arguments

lnkRemove: it is basicly this (lnkRemove list number expression)
No matter what I put in expression nothing changes and I checked if expression needed to be a variable (maybe for getting what you removed) and that didn't work. Anyone have any ideas on what it should be?

[Betelgeuse]

what is the difference between itmSetKnown and itmSetReference?
I can see they do different things but I don't know what each means.

[george moromisato]

more questions
fncHelp: can you make your own strings that this will return for custom made function?
errblock: How are errors handled in transcendence and how does that relate to this function?
iserror: same as above.

atm*: I am guessing that these relate to atoms but I am not sure how.

set: Ok I have no experience with programming in Lisp.
subst: same as above.

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fncHelp: Unfortunately, it is currently not possible to add help to user-defined functions. But that is something that I am planning for the future.

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errblock: The usage pattern for (block) is something like:

(block (var1 var2 ... varn) exp1 exp2 ... expn)

In which exp1 through expn are evaluated in order (and var1 through varn are just local variables). If any of the expressions evaluate to an error, then we stop evaluating and return the error.

The usage pattern for (errblock) is:

(errblock (errorvar var1 var2 ... varn) exp1 exp2 ... expn errorexp)

exp1 through expn are evaluated in order. If any of the expression evaluate to an error, then we assign the error result to errorvar and evaluate errorexp.

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iserror: Returns True if the expression evaluates to an error.

Example:

(divide 10 0) evaluates to an error

But,

(iserror (divide 10 0)) evalutes to True

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(atm*) functions are used to manipulate symbol tables (basically hash tables on strings). In practice they are not that useful.

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set: This is the unquoted version of seq.

(setq test 10) assigns 10 to the variable "test"

This is equivalent to:

(set 'test 10)

Notice the single-quote in front of test. Remember that a single-quote is a way of saying that "test" should be treated as a string and not a variable. Otherwise, a normal function would try to evaluate test and pass the result.

Why is this useful?

(for i 1 10
(set (cat "Var" i) i)
)

Sets variables "Var1" through "Var10" to the numbers 1 through 10.

[Betelgeuse]

thanks a ton

are errors strings?
is there a way to manually raise an error in the xml code?

also I think subst is a string manipulation function but if there isn't how do you manipulate strings (other than cat obviously)?