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Conditional Side Images

If you want your character to have a side image depending on a certain state variable, you can do it like this

   $ e = Character('Emmett',
          color="#c8ffc8",
          window_left_padding=160,
          show_side_image=ConditionSwitch(
          "express == 'serious'", "e_serious.png",
          "express == 'happy'", "e_happy.png",
          "express == 'right'", "e_right.png",
          "express == 'normal'", "e_normal",
        )
    )

Which would be okay if you're going to use only one character with conditional side image. As you start adding more characters, this will result in code repetition however.

A thin-wrapper around ConditionSwitch, using Python can solve this problem:

init python:
  def conditional_portrait(status_var, filename_prefix, states):
        args = []
        for s in states:
            args.append( "%s == '%s'" % (status_var, s) )
# The following line defines the template for your image files
            args.append( Image("%s_%s.png" % (filename_prefix, s)) )
        return ConditionSwitch(*args)


$ e = Character(
        'Emmett',
        color = "#c8ffc8",
        window_left_padding = 160,
        show_side_image = conditional_portrait("express", "e", ["serious", "happy", "right", "normal"])
      )

$ express = "normal"
e "...?"
$ express = "right"
e "Oh no!"

In fact, if you have a commonly used set of states, you can make it into a default argument

init python:
  def conditional_portrait(status_var, filename_prefix, states=["serious", "happy", "right", "normal"]):
    ...
    ...

Now you can create characters like this

$ e = Character(
        'Emmett',
        color = "#c8ffc8",
        window_left_padding = 160,
        show_side_image = conditional_portrait("express", "e") )

skipping the third parameter for conditional_portrait function. You can however override the default argument whenever you want, for example when a character needs a different set of states

$ s = Character(
        'Sakura',
        color = "#c8ffc8",
        window_left_padding = 160,
        show_side_image = conditional_portrait("sakura_express", "s", ["different", "set", "of", "states"])
)

Here we assumed that the filenames for portrait images are like "e_happy.png", "e_sad.png", but of your, you can alter this behavior of conditional_portrait function. Just modify the line

args.append( Image("%s_%s.png" % (filename_prefix, s)) )

for your needs. Here, "%s_%s.png" is the format string, the first %s will be replaced by the filename_prefix and the second one will be replaced by a state, such as happy or sad. If your filenames are like e-happy.jpg for instance, all you need to do is to modify that line to

args.append( Image("%s-%s.jpg" % (filename_prefix, s)) )

In fact, if you like, you can make it into a parameter for conditional_portrait function the as well, with a particular default value, the same way we did for states. Just be careful that the given format string has two %s flags.

  def conditional_portrait(status_var, filename_prefix,
        states=["serious", "happy", "right", "normal"], filename_format="%s_%s.png", **kwargs):
        args = []
        for s in states:
            args.append( "%s == '%s'" % (status_var, s) )
            args.append( Image(filename_format % (filename_prefix, s)) )
        return ConditionSwitch(*args, **kwargs)

It's possible to add an extra **kwargs as well, in case you want to pass extra arguments to ConditionSwitch, such as "xalign=0". You can also hard-code them into the function by modifying the ConditionSwitch call as well, without using kwargs, but it's more flexible this way.