A to Z Scripting: Basic maths

Basic maths symbols

You can use basic maths symbols, as well as brackets (parentheses):

symbol	effect	can be used with
+	add/combine	floats, vectors, strings
-	subtract	floats, vectors
*	multiply	floats
/	divide	floats

The = sign

An important difference is what the = sign does. In scripting, = means "set", while == means "equals".

teleport_destination	= '20 20 20';		//set teleport_destination to '20 20 20'
float1 			= float2 + float3;	//set float1 to the sum of float2 and float3
if ( float1 == float2 )				//check if float1 is equal to float2

== is used in conditionals to check whether a condition is true (2 values are equal to each other) before carrying out an associated set of instructions. That's described in detail in a later article, A to Z Scripting: Conditionals.

Increasing/decreasing

Increasing (incrementing) a variable's value by 1 would work like this:

counter = counter + 1;		//set "counter" to: the current value of "counter" + 1

An alternative method to increase a variable by 1 is:

counter++;			//increase "counter" by 1
counter--;			//decrease "counter" by 1

Combining

You can freely combine script events, variables and absolute values in one line like this:

teleport_destination = $player1.getOrigin() + teleportation_offset + '0 0 16';

Strings can be cobbled together from strings, floats and vectors with the + sign. If you also want to include entities you need to turn them into strings with getName(). This is quite useful for sending helpful messages to the console while testing the script:

sys.println(entity1.getName() + " is at the location " + entity1.getOrigin());	//+ doesn't work with entities, so you need to use getName() to turn it into a string

What you can't do is combine floats and vectors. You'll need to i.e. use a script event to convert the vector into a float (see "Vectors").

Vectors

You can add or subtract vectors from each other. Things like multiplication or finding the magnitude require script events such as DotProduct(), CrossProduct() and vecLength().

You can access & change individual components of a vector variable by appending _x, _y or _z to the name, i.e. teleport_destination_z. These will be floats.

More detail on vector maths and what you can do with it in A to Z Scripting: Special methods.

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