Lemma Soft Forums

First off, hello forum! I'm completely new to this program and as such, easily confused by it, especially since it seems quite simple and I always struggle with the most simplest of tasks. (A bizarre thing indeed.) There's many things I could ask but I'll start with this one...

I'm trying to make an animation where it fades through various images depending on how far you've gotten in the game. However, I'm probably missing something painfully obvious as I continue to get an error about the previous ATL statement not expecting a block. I'd rather not just be linked to wiki pages or anything because believe me, I've read them already. As I stated before, I suck at understanding things that are probably obvious -- much better with complex things. That being said, what is wrong with this and if there is a better method for what I want to do, let me know, I'm eager to learn...



Thanks in advance and feel free to rattle my idiocy.

Welcome!

The problem here is that an image statement isn't allowed to have an if-else structure within it. I can't think of a really simple way around this myself, though I'm not too experienced with ATL.

Here's a sort of roundabout way. I encourage anyone to give better suggestions:



This makes use of the choice statement, which is the nearest thing to if-else that I could find in ATL syntax. A series of choice blocks defines a number of choices that Ren'Py can randomly choose from when those choice blocks are reached. You can specify a number to apply different weights to each choice. So if you have "choice 2.0" followed by "choice 1.0", then the first choice will have a 2/3 chance of being picked, and the second choice will have a 1/3 chance of being picked.

Now my idea was this: have choice 1.0 followed by choice 0.0 if persistent.Michelle_open is True, and have choice 0.0 followed by choice 1.0 is persistent.Michelle_open is False. Though choice is supposed to be a construct for randomness, a weight of 0.0 should guarantee that the other option is picked, which effectively makes this equivalent to if-else. ChooseIfTrue and ChooseIfFalse are Python functions that implement this behavior.

Also, ChooseIfTrue and ChooseIfFalse can be defined in any init-python block.

_________________
Dai-Sukima Dan blog

Thank you!



Well, that would explain that. I had a feeling that that might be it.



Seems like a sound idea and I tried it myself. It's true it does show the images properly but it seems to be inconsistent, even with the proper persistents triggered, the images seem to only have a 50% chance of showing and since I plan to have multiple ones of these, that could be an issue. Rather when I have multiple choices like this, it seems to only pick one those images to show at the end of the line up before repeating.

It is a nice idea though and perhaps I'm merely not implementing it correctly. (Though I did merely copy and paste for the first choice.)

Does it work if you only have one unlockable character?

I think I might see the problem with multiple characters though. If you just have a bunch of choice blocks one after the other, then Ren'Py will group them all together as a single set of choices and then pick one. To prevent that, you'd need to separate out groups of choices like this:

_________________
Dai-Sukima Dan blog