[INTO THE {CODE}]: Hint & HintC

In this series we explore the coding aspects of Arma III. Here we will take you into an in-depth view of how commands works and creative ways to use them. This series is written with the assumption that you understand the basics of coding ie variables , strings and arrays.

Hello and welcome back to into the code with TRC_theassassinzz. Thanks to all of you for the positive feedback from the last installment of this on-going series.

This week we will be reviewing the commands: Hint “”; and HintC “”;

Hint and HintC are used to pass information to players either off to the side of their screen or right in their face interrupting game play.

We've all seen this code in action before. You know that box that comes up on the top right of your screen sometimes? That’s Hint. That annoying pop-up you get sometimes that requires you to click a button or press escape? That’s HintC.

Hint “”; is primarily used to pass information to the players that is useful but not necessarily mission critical. The most common usage of Hint is like follows Hint “Hello World”; The only required argument for Hint is a string. However, Hint will gladly accept structured text.

Here is an example that you can test in game:

Hint format [“My Health Is %1”, (1 - (getDamage player)) * 100];

First you need to know that getDamage gets your damage as a decimal from 0 to 1. Where 1 is dead and 0 is 100% health. The code works is as follows: the format is a modifier telling Hint that any %X is going to be replaced with a Variable, iIn this case our code. The game engine will then take every variable at that is after the “Text”, and replace the corresponding %X with the output . Each comma is another variable therefore requires another %X.

HintC in action

HintC works the same exact way in terms of its code but instead of outputting just a small hint box in the right hand corner of your screen, it outputs a game interrupting text box, with buttons in the center of your screen.

I hope you enjoyed this week's edition of [INTO THE {CODE}]

I apologize for the extended wait, it won’t happen again :D

Once again Thank You for your time,

TRC_Theassassinzz