[Solved] Showing certain dialogues depending if the flag is triggered

[Fabio101]

Complete Renpy novice here. Basically, in my current game I have something that goes along like this:

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menu ask_witnesses:

    "Question1":
        $ question1 = True
            jump question1

    "Question2":
        $ question2 = True
            jump question2

    "Question3"
        $ question3 = True
            jump question2
    
    "Decision" if question1 = True and question2 = True and question3 = True:
        jump decision

Simple right?

What I want to implement is use those flags that will affect the dialogue in those questions. In my brain, it goes something like below and I don't know how to make it work.

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if question1 = True and question2 = False and question3 = False: (basically any combination of 1 true and 2 false flags)
        
        detective "Hmm... suspicious"

if question1 = True and question2 = True and question3 = False:
if question1 = True and question2 = False and question3 = True:

        detective "Hmm... really suspicious"

if question1 = True and question2 = True and question3 = True:

        detective "he's the culprit!"

That's what I want to implement above but for some reason, I don't know how to make it work. I will be pasting the code in all 3 questions as the detective's comment and I want it to flow seamlessly without a menu or something and searching it seems "impossible" (I just don't know what to write exactly the problem).

Thanks for the help.

[kivik]

Hey, welcome to the forum!

First of all, it's really important that you differentiate these two operations:

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question1 = True
question1 == True

The first one with a single = sign assigns whatever's on the right to whatever's on the left of the operator.
The second one with two = signs is a comparison, it returns True or False depending on whether the statement evaluates to True. So your line:

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"Decision" if question1 = True and question2 = True and question3 = True:

needs to be

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"Decision" if question1 == True and question2 == True and question3 == True:

With that out of the way we can do the more advanced stuff!

Another cool feature of comparison operators, is that they do this:

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$ a = False
$ b = True
if a:
    "a evaluated to True"
if b:
    "b evaluated to True"

Output would be "b evaluated to True"

if variable_name is a shorthand for evaluating variables, it's the same as if variable_name == True - if the variable_name is a boolean value (True or False).

But what if it's not a boolean?

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python:
    a = 0
    b = 1
    c = 2
    d = ""
    e = "Hello world!"
if a:
    "a evaluated to True"
if b:
    "b evaluated to True"
if c:
    "c evaluated to True"
if d:
    "d evaluated to True"
if e:
    "e evaluated to True"

This will output b, c and e evaluated to True.

Now I've never asked what's really happening but I know it's what happens, so my way of understanding it is: if you put a variable on its own in an if statement, depending on the type of variable it is, it'll do different evaluations. So the above would be equivalent to:

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if a != 0:
    "a evaluated to True"
if b != 0:
    "b evaluated to True"
if c != 0:
    "c evaluated to True"
if d != "":
    "d evaluated to True"
if e != "":
    "e evaluated to True"

For numbers, 0 returns False, everything else returns True (including negatives); strings, "" returns False, everything else returns True.

Why did I teach you this? Because we can use it to simplify your code. We'll now set the variables to 1:

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menu ask_witnesses:

    "Question1":
        $ question1 = 1
            jump question1

    "Question2":
        $ question2 = 1
            jump question2

    "Question3"
        $ question3 = 1
            jump question2

Then we can do this:

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if question1 and not (question2 + question3):
        detective "Hmm... suspicious"

if question1 and (question2 + question3) == 1:
        detective "Hmm... really suspicious"

if question1 + question2 + question3 == 3:
        detective "he's the culprit!"

You can work out the variations and the corresponding maths by adding your digits together. But also you can do something like this:

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# if question1 is True and any one or more of the other questions is True:

if question1 and question2+question3+question4:

Hope that's informative and will be helpful in the future!

[Fabio101]

Oh my God! It works! Hahaha!

Thank you very much kivik! The tutorial you wrote opened a lot of for me regarding the variable side of things! I'm still learning little by little but this is definitely an eye opener for me regarding its use! I'll stick around the forums!

Kudos!

[kivik]

No problems, I hope it made sense above! I realised I didn't actually explain the final code, so if you have questions do let me know. Variables and conditions can be confusing to start with, but once you've got the basic grasp of it, you can simplify a lot of your code easily. Sometimes it's helpful to just read out loud what you're trying to evaluate and suddenly a simple solution emerges.

When you move to evaluating None, lists, objects, functions, that's when it gets a whole lot more interesting!