Negative variables

Hello everyone! I am making a game where you can have a number that is negative. I have treasury income, I want it to make it so that when I have <= then -100 it displays “We need to adjust the taxes! We are in debts!”
I made it like this :
*if income <= -100
“We need to adjust the taxes! We are in debts!”

But this only make out this error :
startup line 328: Invalid expression at char 14, expected no more tokens, found: OPERATOR
I found this problem on forum but it haven´t been solved. I know that negative numbers don´t make much sense for PC but there should be some way around it. I tried using

*if income <= 100-200

But it ends up the same as previous. Read the wiki but there is nothing about negative numbers. Just the positive ones

Try it with parentheses around the subtraction, like this: *if income <= (100 - 200)

ChoiceScript has no way to tell if you’re trying to use a negative number, or subtract when you enter - 100. Generally it’s recommended that you avoid negative numbers.

There are two normal solutions to this problem, then a third non-recommended one:

Rezero

Use a higher number as you “zero” and calculate from there. For example, if you know income is never going below 1000, rather than start it as *create income 0, you use *create income 1000, and rather than *if income <= -100, you check *if income <= 900 (and your display of income just becomes ${(income-1000)}, if you need to).

Convert it

Go to a subroutine whenever you *set income (either adding or subtracting), you’ll also need to check (off the top of my head and untested):

*if debt > 0
  *set income - debt
  *set debt 0
*if income < 0
  *set debt (0 - income)
  *set income 0

Use work around (Not recommended—may not work in all cases)

To ‘use’ a negative number, use (0-foo) instead. So, for that *if, you’d need to use *if income <= (0-100). (Alternatively to (0-foo), you can also use "-foo" as pointed out by @Szaal below.)

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Actually, you can. Of course, I doubt that CScript register it as a numeric variable, but

*set money "-1"

works.
Applying normal mathematical operations to this variable will also work, although, again, I’m not sure whether CS register it as a numeric variable or a string variable.

*set money "-1"
*set money +100
${money}

This will make your [money] = 99


smol ignorable mundane edit:
Oh, you get a notification when someone edited their post to mention you.
Neat.

1 Like

Hmmm… It seems like Szaal “” tip worked but after the income is set to (for example) 1000 the massage stays there! It ownt get off. I am thinking about something like:
*if income >= “-99”

It will display nothing. But I don´t know if this is possible.
Also it wont show up on first encouter. You have -499 income first when you enter the menu. But it don´t shown your money problems. Only after changing the taxes to not sufficent amout of money it displays it

I believe it should be <, not >.

As my teacher said, pac-man will always eat the biggest pellet.

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That still doesen´t solve the not showing at first sight problem :smiley: But thanks for the first one

Hm. Can I see your code?
Maybe you write it in such a way that the first encounter will always be ignored/passed.

*label overview
*page_break
*if income <= “-100”
“We need to adjust the taxes! We are in debts!”
*if income >= “-99”

*set permit 1
*line_break
Overview
Date : TBA

*choice
#What is today’s State of affairs?
*gosub random

#Advisor! There are things that have to be done!
*goto advisor_options

I was just writing the code you sended so it is not tested yet

When I cahnged
*if income <= “-100”
to
*if income >= “-100”
It started to show the line on first sight but after the income is big again it stays there and it also don´t show the other massage

Ah, I see it now.

Go this

*label overview
*page_break
*if income <= “-100”
   “We need to adjust the taxes! We are in debts!”
*elseif income >= “-99”
   *set permit 1
*line_break
Overview
Date : TBA

You used *if for both checks; this means that both of them will be tested.
If you want to go “if the thing goes this, only do this,” you have to use the trio *if/*else/*elseif.

Oh sorry I forgot :smiley:
But will this make it to appear on first sight?

No, it just don´t work! It won´t show the text at all!

  1. I doubt *if foo <= "-100" works correctly in all circumstances.
  2. Just use
*if` foo <= "-100"
  blah
*else
  blah2

This symbol ` seems like it causes troubles… I delete it and then no foo variable I change it to income and like previously! It just shows that the treasury is ok instead of debts

Oh I am stupid guy… I think I found it. I changed the income only in Stats. I thought that would be enought for the game to change the whole game $!{income} but it proppably changed only for Stats screen and not for any other .txt file

OK sorry to everyone! I found out that the income doesen´t rewrite itself to all txt files and that I need to do it manually. Don´t know if there is some wayaround but after I rewrite it I will write the result. Thanks everyone!

1 Like