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!"