Adding a Value to Game Money

[mpalmer2140]

Hello,

I am trying to help a student create a text adventure game. We are having trouble setting the players starting money, I have added screen shots to what we have tried but we are getting two different sections.

The player starts with 1000cp. Do we need to add a starting script and if we do how would we define this?

[KVonGit]

Hello,

You are very close.

You have !cp in the "Format for money" value, and Quest puts the "Money: " before that by default. So, that's where the 2nd line ("Money: 0cp") is coming from.

Then, under Player status attributes you don't need anything at all, but, to explain what's happening: you have game.money as the Key, which isn't what it would need if this were how you were handling the status attribute. It would only need to be money. Also, as the value, you have 1000 which won't set that as the start value of the player's money, as one might expect. That will actually make the text in the pane 1000, without ever changing during play. If we were handling this with this approach, this should be ! cp (and Quest would replace ! with the current value of game.pov.money during play).

So that's why it's printing:

1000
Money: 0cp

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The Fix

To make this work the easiest, most efficient way, you only need three things (after removing the Player object status attribute stuff you currently have in that screenshot):

Under the Features tab on the game object, tick the Money checkbox:

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Now switch to the Player tab and change $! to ! cp (or !cp if you don't want the space) to make that show up how you want it.

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Finally, as you guessed, if you want to start off with 1,000 cp, when creating games online, you'll need to handle that in the start script by setting game.pov.money to 1000:

// Add this line to the game start script in code view
game.pov.money = 1000

In the GUI, it looks like this:

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[Pertex]

Would it be ok to just take the item once it has been purchased and then dropped?

[mpalmer2140]

Don't apologize, we are happy for the help and even more because that worked! Thank you so much, items can be purchased, dropped and then purchased again.

[mpalmer2140]

Hello again,

Can I create a separate buy command for particular objects? There are certain objects in the Drawbacks room which will increase your money if taken and decrease your money if dropped?

I know I can set this within the object itself however, the buy command we created is overriding this.

[mpalmer2140]

Nvm, actually figured it out by creating a take command and having that only apply to those particular objects

[KVonGit]

Sounds like you're getting the hang of it!

There is no wrong way to do anything in Quest, as long as your way works. =)

...but if the custom take command you created ends up getting too big for its britches (depending on how many objects end up having their own scripts), you could also just change an object's take attribute to a script, without needing a custom take command.