I'm looking at a new way of re scripting some elements of my game and i came up with the thought of:



but it doesn't work, the reason i wanted to do this was so i could use one short function and affect whichever entity i choose just by editing the STRING...

any ideas on this?

heya, have a look at engine_getvar()

Hi
I don't know if that is possible but why don't you give the pointer as an argument when you call your function?

Gerrit

noobish question but am not that great at all the programming elements yet, could you give me an example of this? i mean, i do have workarounds but i'm just looking an easier and faster way, it would also help in other areas...

Did you try:
- ent_for_name (STRING* name);

Problem here: You can only use names which you set by using WED. At least thats how I understood the documentation about the command.

Maybe I misunderstand what you're trying to do, but this should do the trick:

ok, let me try and simplify this.. basically all i want to do is use a string to refer to an entity pointer, so instead of

ENTITY*box;

set(box,INVISIBLE);

i could have:


ENTITY*box;

STRING* somestring= "box";

set(somestring,INVISIBLE);

why would i want to do this? well, this way i could juet edit the string to refer to another entity and that new enitity would get invisible.

The problem is: how do you want to identify the very object you want to edit?
A pointer is a memory address to a specific entity and thus you can edit that very entity.
A string with "box" inside is hard to translate to a specific entity.
Because how do you want to identify it?
By the filename? What about multiple instances of a file then?

You can use either the filename or you use a name which you attached to an entity using WED and use the command ent_for_name

You could also store the name in a skill or in string1/2.
Then you have to search the entity in the list of entities and then edit it.

To associate a pointer with a string you could also use a hash map (see GSHashmap by pegamode) or a similar data structure. This should be considered if you need many string lookups per frame, because a linear search is much slower.