[HELP] AGAIN command not working.

[Blake Regehr]

Hey! I am making a game inspired by the puzzling scenarios you get yourself into when you play a game like Steamworld Dig or Dig Dug. I need to make rocks fall after you dig under them and I'd like a smooth animation, but the again command seems to fire off instantly and there's no delay. I've used again_interval at the beginning of my code, but it didn't change anything. The second reason I'd like this again command is that it looks like when two rocks fall, they crush each other into one rock. I'd love to share the link to the project, but it seems that GitHub is down. I'll post some code here.

(Rock pushing)

[ >  Player | Rock ] -> [  >  Player | > Rock  ]

(Player falling / gravity)

late down [Player | No Solid] -> [ | Player] again

late down [UnstableRock | No Solid] -> [ | UnstableRock]again

late down [PhysicsObj | No Solid] -> [ | PhysicsObj]again

late down [Rock | No Solid] -> [ UnstableRock | No Solid]

late down [UnstableRock | Solid] -> [Rock | Solid]

(digging)

Left [ > Player | Dirt] -> [ > Player | ]

Right [ > Player | Dirt] -> [ > Player | ]

Down [ > Player | Dirt] -> [ > Player | ]

Up [ > Player | Dirt] -> [ Player | ]

(collecting gem)

[ > Player | Gem] -> [ > Player | ]

Can anyone explain what is happening?

[Chris Pickel]

Rules apply repeatedly until they no longer can be applied. With these rules, the rock falls and falls before even getting to the “again” tick (you should see the same behavior even without “again”). You want to have the rule apply only once to each rock in each tick.

One way to do this is to add a new object (Falling) that marks objects that should fall, and remove it after it has applied to a given rock:

late [Rock] -> [Falling Rock]

late down [Falling Rock | no Solid] -> [| Rock] again

late [Falling] -> []

https://www.puzzlescript.net/editor.html?hack=9677e195b6bb814241c27e1e4c085dc4

Another way is to move the rocks with motions, which automatically apply only once. But for that, you would have to delay falling to the “again” tick. You can detect that with “[stationary Player]”:

[stationary Player] [Rock] -> [stationary Player] [down Rock]

late down [Rock | no Solid] -> again

https://www.puzzlescript.net/editor.html?hack=fb4038448a3402c1fb8ebeb96a9b959b

In the second approach, the rock will wait until after the player finishes moving to start falling.

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[Skalmantas Šimėnas]

Iterating on what Chris said:

You already differentiate Rock and UnstableRock so there's no need for "falling" for that specific purpose. For rocks to fall more slowly, I think all you need to change is this line:

late down [UnstableRock | No Solid] -> [ | Rock]again

But since gravity is quite universal for most objects, I'd choose the new object approach (and I actually do just that in my own game that has gravity). To make something complicated in puzzlescript, you need to make lots of helper objects. A very basic 2x1 sized box in my game is a compound of many "side of a box" objects, a background object and the box "controller" itself that everything else is "attached" to. All this mess gets "tagged" and "untagged" many times during one turn by adding specific invisible objects on top and deleting them.

To understand "again" and puzzlescript rules better, you should check out some documentation pages like this one, then enable `verbose_logging` in the prelude and maybe even try out the universal rule I use for my own game (not applicable in every game but I like this rule):

[] -> again