don't understand this

[onurb]

I grew up with the wizardFE and the language used there. I am used to matches and matchwaits that look like this:

start:
match west Person says, "go west"
match east Person says, "go east"
matchwait

west:
move west
goto start

east:
move east
goto start

But I been slowly learning lich & ruby and getting away from wizardFE and I am now trying to figure out how matches work. Here are the examples from the Lich Scripting Reference wiki page. I don't understand the examples. To me, a match has always been if the string matches, it sends you do a different area of the script (wherever you put the label). Can anyone give better examples, explanations, or maybe paste a part of your script that has a match section so I can see how it works?

matchwait
example: (none)
Returns: a string
Description: If used without any arguments, 100% identical to Wizard 'matchwait' commands. You can optionally give it arguments, in which case it acts identically to 'waitfor' in all ways except one: matches are case sensitive (for instance, matchwait "shaelun" will not match if the word "Shaelun" is seen from the game).

so on this one, if I do like...
matchwait "red", "green", "blue"
that means the script completely stops until it sees red, green, or blue? What if I wanted red to do this, or green to do that, or blue to do something else?

match
example: match 'label', 'line to watch for'
example: match "gameline", "gameline", "some other gameline", "so on and so forth"
Returns: a string
Description: If given exactly two arguments, identical to the Wizard 'match' command. If given *any* other number of arguments, it's a case sensitive version of 'waitfor' but instead of returning the entire matching game line, it returns only the portion of the string you asked it to watch for.

And on this one, I am not understanding the label part. What good is a label, what does it do? In my mind, a label would be "start:" "west:" and "east:" like in my wizardFE example.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Tgo01]

The simplest way to do something like this is to use a simple while loop.



while line = get
if line =~ /Person says, "go west"/
move "west"
elsif line =~ /Person says, "go east"/
move "east"
end
end


The only thing to keep in mind is each script can only be looking for game lines in one spot at a time in the code. So the while loop I showed here is reading each game line and when it makes a match it executes the code below it. fput and move also read game lines when they are executing code so it's possible that if the script sees go west and does move "west" it might miss another line that says go east, which means it wouldn't move east. Unless you're in RT or stunned or something when you receive the go west command then it should only take less than half a second to actually move west and the while loop is again reading game lines, so as long as these commands aren't being sent to the script rapid fire or anything then this should suit your needs.

Things would get slightly more complicated if you don't want to miss any commands and you end up missing some commands.

[onurb]

what part of that example is causing it to loop back to its beginning after it finds a match? is that just a natural property of "while"?

[Tgo01]

what part of that example is causing it to loop back to its beginning after it finds a match? is that just a natural property of "while"?

A while loop keeps running in a loop until you use the word break.

So a while loop just basically keeps looping forever until you break out of it, and whenever it makes a match it executes the code underneath the match.

[onurb]

Also what if I wanted the script to discontinue the loop and head down the page once it found a match like this...

while line = get
if line =~ /Person says, "go west"/
send the script to the hello fput
elsif line =~ /Person says, "go east"/
send the script to the hello fput
end
end

fput "hello"

[Tgo01]

Also what if I wanted the script to discontinue the loop and head down the page once it found a match like this...

while line = get
if line =~ /Person says, "go west"/
send the script to the hello fput
elsif line =~ /Person says, "go east"/
send the script to the hello fput
end
end

fput "hello"

That's where you would use break.



while line = get
if line =~ /Person says, "go west"/
break
elsif line =~ /Person says, "go east"/
break
end
end

fput "hello"


So in this example if the script sees "go west" or "go east" it would break out of the while loop and then do fput "hello"

Keep in mind at this point the script would exit if this is the entirety of your script.

[onurb]

tyvm, this has helped me alot. though one day I would still like to see how match works, but for the time being this solution is working.

[Tgo01]

tyvm, this has helped me alot. though one day I would still like to see how match works, but for the time being this solution is working.

I'm pretty sure match and matchwait aren't native to Ruby, rather it's something Tillmen put into Lich so people could use those features if they are used to scripting in SF.

That's not to say you can't use match/matchwait if you want to, but I don't know how they work either because I never looked into it on Lich. Someone else might know more about those features in Lich.