SetTimout with Quest 5.9

[Zanderkat]

Is there a way to immediately trigger any active timers created through SetTimeout? My game is filled with a bunch of nameless timers created in this way, and I was hoping to give the player a function that would skip the waiting period.

[KVonGit]

Hello.

I can't seem to find a function to return a list of timers, but this might be a little help.

---

To test things, I put this in the start script to create two unnamed timeouts:

SetTimeout (1000) {
  msg ("foo")
}
SetTimeout (2000) {
  msg ("bar")
}

---

Now, while the game is running, in the debugger under Timers, I see those have been automatically named "timeout" and "timeout1":

---

So, if I want to call their scripts (and they will self-destruct after their scripts run):

do (timeout, "script")
do (timeout1, "script")

---

Or to just disable them:

timeout.enabled = false
timeout1.enabled = false

---

Or to completely destroy them without running them:

destroy ("timeout")
destroy ("timeout1")

---

I don't see a built-in way to get a list of timeouts.

So, you'd have to know how many timeouts like this are in the game to be able to write a script to do one of the three things above to all of them at once.

...or I just wrote this function:

  <function name="AllGenericTimeouts" type="objectlist"><![CDATA[
    timeoutList = NewObjectList()
    first = GetTimer("timeout")
    if (not first <> null) {
      return (timeoutList)
    }
    list add (timeoutList, first)
    i = 100
    while (i > 1) {
      i = i - 1
      mytimeout = GetTimer("timeout" + i)
      if (mytimeout <> null) {
        list add (timeoutList, mytimeout)
      }
    }
    return (timeoutList)
  ]]></function>

---

If there are more than 100 timeouts in the game, change the line i = 100 accordingly.

That function will return an object list of every timer in the game with a name beginning with "timeout", including the first "timeout" plus any others with 1 through 100 appended to the name "timeout".

To run them all:

allGenericTimeouts = AllGenericTimeouts()
if (ListCount(allGenericTimeouts) > 0) {
  foreach (gt, allGenericTimeouts) {
    do (gt, "script")
  }
}

To disable them all:

allGenericTimeouts = AllGenericTimeouts()
if (ListCount(allGenericTimeouts) > 0) {
  foreach (gt, allGenericTimeouts) {
    gt.enabled = false
  }
}

To destroy them all:

allGenericTimeouts = AllGenericTimeouts()
if (ListCount(allGenericTimeouts) > 0) {
  foreach (gt, allGenericTimeouts) {
    destroy (gt.name)
  }
}

---

https://docs.textadventures.co.uk/quest/functions/#timers-and-turnscripts

[Pertex]

Is this

    if (not first <> null) {
      return (timeoutList)
    }

better than

    if (first = null) {
      return (timeoutList)
    }

?

[KVonGit]

I'm not sure where I got it from now (Pixie or a post from Jay, probably), but it seems like a made a mental note that first = null doesn't always work as expected, but not first <> null will always work. (I'll try to find where I got that from.)

I have no clue if it would work... Did you try it that way?

[Pertex]

I always use if(xx=null) in my game and I found no problem with it

[KVonGit]

I just tested that a few different ways, and you are correct: a = b seems to behave identically to not a <> b.

I just searched for quite a while, and I see not ... <> in code in quite a few places from before my time, but I can't find the thread where someone explained it to me. I remember asking why it was written this way, and it seems like the answer was something undefined shows up as an Object type sometimes when using =, but not when using not obj <> null. If I find it, I'll share. Until then, I couldn't find a case where = didn't work just the same.