? Condition
Control if a statement should play
Another important aspect of creating story branches is Conditions. When writing a story, you often need a story section to be played only in specific states.
Conditions allow you to check if a specific statement or section should be played or ignored by running an expression evaluation first. If the evaluation returns on (true), the condition is successful, and the line is played. If the condition fails, the line is ignored.
A condition statement can optionally start with a ? (Question Mark)
A condition statement is named after its functionality
If: Check an initial condition
elseif: Check as many secondary conditions as needed
else: This section plays if all if and elseif conditions fail
A conditions statement sequence must always end with an endif marker
In the example above, the script section from line 6 to line 17 is played only if the condition on line 6 is evaluated as true.
Using elseif and else conditions are completely optional. You can use as many elseif as required.
You can nest if conditions inside each other, just remember to close each individual "if's collection of statements" with an endif statement, as shown above.
Expression
A condition is always an expression, the same method used to assign value to a variable. Therefore, conditions can use the same operators and syntax used by command expressions and be as complex as required.
Condition as Instruction
You can use a condition instruction within any other statement to check if that single statement can be played or should be ignored.
A condition instruction starts with a ? (Question Mark) followed by an expression.
A condition instruction is successful when its expression is evaluated as on and fails in any other case.
In the first dialogue, the interpreter checks if a previously created Quillscript variable has a value bigger or equal to 5. The second dialogue covers the remaining option, that is, if charisma is smaller than 5.
You can add as many conditions as needed to a single statement.
In Dialogue, Router, and Command
If any condition instruction fails, the statement is ignored, and the script flow proceeds to the following statement.
In Option
Conditions are pre-evaluated and passed to the Play event of the Selection Box widget as a Boolean parameter called Valid. This parameter does nothing by itself; it’s delegated to the Selection Box widget to decide what to do with this information. In most cases, the widget hides, gray out, or lock invalid options.
In Label
The label and its content are ignored if any condition instruction fails, and the script flow proceeds to the following label statement.
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