So in my current project, the sentence that I am trying to write is:
“No way! You’re a $!{lastname}!”
But that would create an issue if their last name started with a vowel.
“No way! You’re a Eaton!”
See what I mean?
So how would I create a potential *if statement for the first letter of the word?
Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
Well, I think there’re 3 steps you need to do.
- Establish a boolean variable to identify the first letter of the lastname. This variable will contain TRUE for a vowel, and False for consonant (or vice versa, your call)
- On your character generation page, put a conditional check code to identify the first letter.
Use*if (surname#1 = "A") or (surname#1 = "E")
and so on.
Refer to the “Extracting letter” section of the wiki. - Using multireplace
@{}
, you can now issue a or an depending on the variable you just set up.
For example, let’s say ur variable is [a] and the PC has their lastname as “Eaton.”
You can do
This should produce a natural sounding texts despite the PC’s lastname.
It might looks intimidating at first, but when you get the hang of it, it’s actually a piece of cake.
In fact, my story is filled with those @
s
If it’s an issue with a lot of your variables, or a variable set by the player, then you could set a special variable for a/an like Szaal suggests.
In my own game, I’m pretty sure there’s only one variable where this is an issue – moot, which can be set as “moot” or “apella”. So I just made a second variable, a_moot, which is set to either “a moot” or “an apella,” and I use it wherever the sentence structure demands an indefinite article. Way easier.
This wouldn’t work for an input_text variable where you’ve no control over whether the player has started it with a vowel. I’ve got a few of those, and I just don’t use them in ways that demand the use of a/an. In your case, that would mean switching to a different sentence structure e.g. “No way! You’re one of the ${lastname}s!”
Which works best for you will probably depend on how many situations you think there’ll be where you’ll want a a/an variable. I tried a similar avoidance approach with “his/hers” – just not use it and restructure in a way that always used “his/her” – but eventually recognized that I was circumventing it enough that I might as well just make the variable.
You’re right, I never thought about it
Hmm… in fact, I just realized another coding method which is less complicated than my previous comment… but let’s see which one the OP’s prefer
Thank you Havenstone and Szaal (Not entirely sure how to tag you guys). I think that for this particular case, I will just change the sentence structure, because I do not think that a similar case will happen later in my story, but if I do change my mind, I will definitely use your input. Thank you very much!