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Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 656 Location: USA

Can somebody help me figure out how to do this.

I have some stories and poems stored in individual text files.

I would like to create a alias that I can type in the name of the story and it will open the file and my character will say the story one line at a time with a short pause between each line. I also need some way to abort the reading or pause the reading.

The biggest problems is how to pause or abort

This is what I'm thinking thus far, but does not do everything I need

open the file using the parm + .txt
read the file into a variable
replace line breaks with | to turn it into a stringlist
foreach string say the text

or

open the file using the parm + .txt
call to a function that
reads the next line
If Not end of file
Say the text
delay a few seconds
call itself

Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 12:35 am

Store information on the number of lines in the story, in the first line of the text file.
Extract that information to a variable at the beginning (could even have information in it that sets the pause between each line if you wanted.

Name: <storyname> Lines: 23 Special Pauses: 17: 5000, 22: 1000
(where 17 and 22 are non-default pauses in milliseconds. Just an idea though.)

Use #File 1 storyname.txt
to set the story

Use #READ 1 1
to get the info from the first line, including totalStoryLines=23
currentStoryLine=2

#AL readstory {
#IF (%1="pause") {storypaused=1}
#IF (%1="continue" {storypaused=0}
#IF (!$storyPaused) {#READ 1 @currentStoryLine
#ADD currentStoryLine 1
#IF (@currentStoryLine!>@totalStoryLines) {#AL +2 {readstory}}}}

"readstory"
to read the story line by line.
"readstory pause"
to stop it
"readstory continue" to restart it

I didn't elaborate on the customised pause lengths because I have no idea if you're actually interested in that.

Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 12:36 am

Either way works, but each time the function is called or the foreach tries a new item, check to see if some variable is 1. If it is, abort.

For the pausing, you might find the easiest way is to put it in its own thread an use #waitsignal. Another method would be to use a copy of the source variable for your forall:

$file=@file
#forall $file {}

and then remove the lines from @file when you say them. When you "pause" the reading, you really abort it and then just resume it from the @file variable.

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 656 Location: USA

Thanks for the reply. I have something working now, except for one minor problem.

After reviewing your responses, here is what I did.

I decided to use a menu button instead. So I setup a button called StoryTelling type=menu with the following selections

Start

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

I would suggest checking to see if %read returned a null. Then put a space in all the blank lines in your stories so that %read will return " " instead of "" for a blank line and only return the null when it gets to the end.

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 656 Location: USA

Thanks, got it working good now.

Here is the completed code.

Alias TellStory

Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 3:18 am

If you want pausing to be a bit more responsive, I suggest you do away with the alarm loop that periodically checks, and just run the tellstory alias again manually when you set the variable back to 1. I assume you have an alias that sets the storycontrol value, so it should be trivial to run the alias at the same time.