Post by Maxjk0 in Lil Programming Questions

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Im very confused as to how I am meant to do something like a basic inventory, or even a basic variable to keep track of progression?

Im going over the documentation and it feels like it's getting way too in depth with things way too quick, but I cant for the life of me figure that out?

So i assume i need to have a card at the beginning that has variables, so i tried setting some in the on-click of the "start" button i made for my game, but then i tried referencing it and it doesnt seem like it does anything?

is there a good example of something like this setup with more full context than the "primer" in the documentation? one that actually shows all of the relevant scripts, and where they need to go in order for this to work right?

Screwtapello2 days ago(+2)

If you’re used to other programming languages, Decker is a bit unusual. In most languages, if you wanted to set up a score counter on-screen, you might do something like this:

# Executed at startup
score:0

# In some kind of button
on click do
 score:score+1
end

# Called to redraw the screen
on view do
 canvas.text[score 0,0]
end

This doesn’t work in Decker, because Lil variables do not persist. If you set up a variable inside a function, it’s forgotten when the function returns. If you set up a variable in the top-level of a script (as in the example above), it gets re-executed every time any event is triggered.

Instead, if you want to store state, you need to use widgets. Put a text-field on your card, name it score, position it where you want the score to be visible on-screen, lock it so that the player can’t just edit it. Then you can do:

# In the "New Game" button
on click do
 score.text:0
end

# In some kind of button
on click do
 score.text:score.text+1
end

Instead of the on-screen display being the result of some rendering and calculation, it’s The Actual Thing. If you want to have state that isn’t displayed to the player (things like “has the player opened the doorway hidden behind the bookcase”), you can make them “Show None”, or put them on an entirely different card (sometimes called backstage) that the player can’t get to, and then scripts on other cards can refer to backstage.widgets.score.text.

Maxjk01 day ago(+3)

Thank you so much, while I was able to eventually figure this out on my own, I genuinely feel like this little breakdown would have introduced me to the way of doing things in Lil a lot better than what I was able to find in the documentation myself

the specific vernacular of "(cardname).(widgets).(widgetName).text" in particular just completely eluded me in the documentation for some reason

Harlequin Diver1 day ago(+3)

One thing that I also find useful for variables is to have one card for all your variables and to write this line of code on the script of your deck:

var:variables.widgets

That way, you don't have to write variables.widgets every time and simply write var.myvariable.value for exemple.

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