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Home > Articles > Tutorials > Ruby Game Scripting System (RGSS) > RGSS For Dummies Tutorial 2: Variables

RGSS For Dummies Tutorial 2: Variables

Author: RPG
Updated: September 04, 2007

Introduction

Forget all about the first tutorial (the basics), I only wrote it to give you a general idea about scripting/programming. You need to understand the example from the last tutorial though, you need to know that ( print stuff ) displays stuff on the screen (in RMXP's case, it displays a message box) and that ( # stuff ) is a comment ignored by the compiler, it's just there to remind you of stuff or comment stuff out. Enough with stuff, let's get to some fun stuff. Variables are storage places for your stuff, you stuff your stuff in variables and then use them for other stuff. Did I mention that the Finnish word for stuff is Juttuja? And no, I'm not Finnish but I thought it was some interesting stuff.

Contents

1. Values
2. Advanced Note
3. Variables
4. The Need for Variables
5. Assignment
6. Variable Fun
7. Conclusion
8. Summary

1. Values

There are cases (many of them!) where you'd need to store some value in the computer's memory. But before discussing how or why would we do such a thing, let's try to understand what a value is. Most of the time, the value is a number. It could be someone's age, an enemy's HP, an ID number, a random number, number of saves, etc. The values of those 'variables' (they vary from person to person, enemy to another, game to game, etc.) could be 34 for age, 9999 for Enemy HP, 1921 for ID, 0.3563 for random numbers, 3 for saves. So basically, a numeric value is a number! Isn't that awesome? Now, a number could be an integer or a float. An integer has no fraction, like: 1, 34, -57, 9834, 0, -346. Integers are useful because you don't need fractions often, you can't have 3.5 living cows for example. Most of the time you'll be dealing with integers. (Actually, the variables used in RPG Maker XP/2K/3's point scripting are always integers) Sometimes you might want to use fractions, if you and your friend had one apple that you wanted to share, each of you would get half an apple. If we're using integers, you can't divide the apple so one would get the whole thing and the other won't get anything. We need to use fractions so that each of you get 0.5 (1/2) apple, and we use floats to represent such values. I can't think of many situations where you'd need to use floats in programming, they're useful in programs where you need to get scary things like angles, circles, flying cows and other stuff that gets you an F in school.

A special case of integer values are Booleans, values that can be either on or off, true or false. They are like RPG Maker XP/2K/3 switches, you either opened the chest or didn't, talked to the king or didn't, killed the cow or didn't. I said they're a special case of integer values while they are not, but thinking of them as the integers 1 and 0 could be useful. 0 could be off (false) and 1 could be on (true), but Boolean values aren't integers and you can't add two Booleans for example. Basically, the value of a Boolean is either true or false. You can either turn a light on (true) or off (false), and your nose could be green (true) or red (false), etc. The real use of Booleans is to evaluate expressions, which we'd discuss in the 3rd tutorial. (next one)

The final type of values that we are going to discuss here is strings. A string is basically a string (array) of characters, but that doesn't really tell anything, does it? Basically, a string is a sentence, or maybe a group of them, or maybe just some random words. Just think of strings as text, you might need to store the someone's name, some messages, etc. Strings in Ruby (RGSS) are placed within quotation marks (either ' ' or " "), some examples of strings would be: 'Alex RTPson', "Hello!", 'I had a big monkey and it was funny', "sretpok jifrjio uhure", 'abc'. It is recommended that you use single quotes ( ' ' ) whenever possible, I'd rather use double quotes myself (because most programming languages do) but using in Ruby isn't very efficient because the compiler (RMXP in this case) will need to check more things and that might slow things down. Back to strings, you store text as string values, you can also add some strings together, for example 'I like ' + 'cows'. Enough said.

2. Advanced Note

I'll often use the term 'store' to refer to how variables and values (objects) interact. In Ruby's case, the variable doesn't really store the value but rather refer to it. The value is stored in the memory and a variable or more refer to it. A variable is a reference to some value and two variables might refer to the same value and changing one variable's value also changes it in the other. However, I think using 'store' might make variables easier to understand for beginners, but that's just me.

3. Variables

Now, sometimes we might need to store a value for later use. We use variables to do that. A variable is basically a name (identifier) that represents a value stored in memory. For example, my_age could be a variable that stores your age. You can later use variables as you use their values; for instance, you can do arithmetic operation on numeric variables. In Ruby (RGSS) variables are all objects, but you don't need to worry about that for now. Keep in mind that variable names (identifiers) can't start with a capital letter for some reason (except in certain cases), here are some valid names: age, enemyHP, id_number, RaNdOm, num_of_saves. Variable names are also case sensitive, password and passworD aren't the same thing. Here's a little example of variables:

number1 = 9
number2 = 1
number3 = number1 + number2
print number3   # 10

Basically, we declare two variables (number1 and number2) with values 9 and 1. We add the two variables and store the sum in a third variable (number3). Finally, we display the value of the third variable (number3). You can test it yourself, make a new event, go to the third page of the command list and paste the example. When you activate the event you should get a message box with the number 10. (another way to do it is adding a new section to the script editor and pasting that, you'll see the message box when you start the game) As you can see, variables act just like their values. The same example could be written as ( print 9 + 1 ). Also notice the comment ( # 10), it's on the same line as the print command. You can always do that, as long as it's after the code. In this series of tutorials, I'll always place a comment with the display value after the print command (function), there are times when you don't know the output value though... actually, you use variables because you don't! Our example is really stupid actually, why would we need to store these values in variables if we can use them directly? Why use variables?

4. The Need for Variables

There are cases where you don't really know the values you're dealing with. Maybe you wrote a program that asks the user for two numbers and then displays the sum. The user might type any two numbers, you can't just guess the numbers or anything. So, if we store the number (without knowing what the number is) in a variable, we can operate on it with ease. Another example is the stats of the hero in some game, you can't always know what the HP, level, strength, etc of the hero is, and you might not be able to know how many potions does the party hold. Why not? Because the game stats vary from time to time and from a person to another; we can just store the hero's HP in a variable and then use it as we please. A final example of the uses of variables would be constant values that you change, sometimes you know the value of something (someone's age for example) and you use that value heavily in your code. But what if the value changed? (that someone's birthday came and they're one year older) You'll have to change all the occurrences of that value in your code. Note that the value is constant (it doesn't change during the execution of your program) but it could change outside your program, so you just use a variable and change it's initial value whenever you like. As we can see from the previous examples, variables are used for values that 'vary'. In other words, variables are used to store 'variable' (changing) data. It might not be very clear at the moment, but you'll see how important they are as you learn more.

5. Assignment

Assignment refers to assigning a value to a variable, i.e saying that this variable stores this value. We use the equal sign for assignment, it might look mathematically incorrect as in the following example:

my_var = my_var + 7

It doesn't mean that my_var is equal to my_var + 7, it means that we calculate the stuff on the right side of the equal sign and then store it in the variable on the left side. So, think of the equal sign as an assignment (assign some value to some variable) rather than an equality. The variable is declared (the program knows about it) when you assign some value to it, here are some examples of assignment:

cow = "Hello this is some random text"
magic = 7 + 13 - 9 * 100 / (1 - 3)
teh_var = true
heroHP = 9999

And some different ways to assign things:

cow = magic = teh_var = 3
cow, magic = 1, 2

The first line is like saying "store 3 in cow, magic and teh_var". The second line is like saying "store 1 in cow, store 2 in magic".

6. Variable Fun

Now, let's have some examples of variables. Each example is basically a comment describing how things work, some variable operations and then a print statement. I'll use ( p stuff ) instead of ( print stuff ) from now on (because I'm lazy), both of them are the same.

# Just some mathematics. 
# The * sign is used to indicate multiplication (number x number),
# the / sign indicates division.
a = 2
b = 4
p a + b   # 6
p a - b   # -2
p b - a   # 2
p a * b   # 8
p b / a   # 2

# You can join two strings together by using the plus (+) sign
text1 = 'mon'
text2 = 'key'
p text1 + text2   # "monkey"

# We store a 'lol' in v1, we store v1's value in v2, we store "!!!" in v3
# Then we print v1 + ' ' (space) + v2 + v3
v1 = 'lol'
v2 = v1
v3 = '!!!'
p v1 + ' ' + v2 + v3  # "lol lol!!!"

# One of the ways to add some numeric value to a string is embedding it
# using #{}, you just put #{number or variable} inside the string.
# When you do that, you must use double quotes (" ") for the string.
# Double quotes lets the compiler check the string to find any #{}s
# otherwise (single quotes), no checking is done and no conversion either.
num = 1337
p "The number is #{num}"   # "The number is 1337"

# Another way is using number.to_s, like this:
num = 1337
p 'The number is ' + num.to_s   # "The number is 1337" 

# You can also convert strings to numbers.
# You see, 3 and '3' aren't the same thing, you
# can't do '3' + 1 because '3' is a string.
# To change it into an integer use string.to_i
var = '3'
p var.to_i + 1   # 4

# Just a note, you don't need to use variables
# to use .to_s and .to_i
p 'The number is ' + 1337.to_s   # "The number is 1337"
p '3'.to_i + 1   # 4

7. Conclusion

Variables allow us to store values that vary, although all the examples shown didn't really show useful variables. Understanding variables is essential; you won't go far without using them. I tried to make this tutorial very easy to understand but I might've failed in doing that. Don't worry though, you can find tons of variable tutorials on Google or something, and you can always read this boring tutorial again. The next tutorial will be about flow control statements such as loops and the if statement. Later~

8. Summary