Ambrosia Garden Archive
    • Globals


      Yeah in the pic of the day today(friday before christmas) it had menu like thingy with "globals".

      What are "globals?"

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      "Do you expect me to talk?"
      "Why no Mr. Bond! I expect you to die!"

    • OK, I could be wrong here, but...

      In programmer parlance, a global is a 'global variable,' that is, some unfixed piece of data that needs to be accessed by all parts of the program.

      A global variable in the case of a Coldstone game could be something like 'number of times the spell "fireball" has been cast,' because you want it to backfire every five-hundred castings, and on the 666th casting, it will summong Garzoth the Great to take you to the demi-plane of Hades.

      OK, so that's a bad example, but the idea is to provide you with a way to keep track of data that does not belong to a specific object (for example, player, map, item, npc, etc).

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      --You notice that you have been turned into a pile of ashes.

    • Yeah, that's exactly what globals are. (I think ;))

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    • Yes. That's usually what a global is.

      -cybergnu

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      "The Gnuey Boy"

    • Quote

      Originally posted by sanehatter:
      **OK, I could be wrong here, but...

      In programmer parlance, a global is a 'global variable,' that is, some unfixed piece of data that needs to be accessed by all parts of the program.

      A global variable in the case of a Coldstone game could be something like 'number of times the spell "fireball" has been cast,' because you want it to backfire every five-hundred castings, and on the 666th casting, it will summong Garzoth the Great to take you to the demi-plane of Hades.

      OK, so that's a bad example, but the idea is to provide you with a way to keep track of data that does not belong to a specific object (for example, player, map, item, npc, etc).
      **

      Sanehatter is partially correct but mainly wrong 😄

      Global variables can be accessed throughout the program (or game)... They are defined at the beginning as 'global' and contain information that is (or can be) used/modified anywhere in the program or at 'runtime'.

      In the case of Coldstone and games in general (the runtime case) global variables are quite frequently (but not necessarily, this is a major weakness of Realmz/Divinity) used to keep track of data that DOES belong to a specific object:

      Player characters name and all others stats for them, player position on game board, time info (day/hour), items in player possession, known spells... In short, any info that is changing and is needed to determine outcome of player actions/decisions or is used to display info on the screen to the player. There are many other uses for globals within a program (that never see screen phosphor) but these must be used judiciously or insidious bugs of the most horrible kind grow and flourish.

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      ...it wasn't me...

    • Gotcha. I haven't taken a programming class since I was in High School a few eons ago, and we were using Pascal then; my knowledge on things programatic is rusty at best. I was using the number as an example because the screenshot in question featured methods to operate mathematically on the gloabls.

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      --You notice that you have been turned into a pile of ashes.

    • Alrighty, so if old Griselga destroys the Spider Queen then I can make every mage across my game learn the spell "Spider Blaze" or something?

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      "Do you expect me to talk?"
      "Why no Mr. Bond! I expect you to die!"