MMF2 expression help

[DR. Demon Lizardman]

Yeah, the expression formulas are confusing as ****. I really want a good tutorial to understand them all.

[Xgoff]

so... are you referring to the expression dialogs or to the actual functions inside the expressions

[DR. Demon Lizardman]

Well, both of them actually.

[Xgoff]

well it'd be hard to "explain them all" in regards to the functions because there are a ****ton, especially if you bring extensions into the picture... but i'll attempt to explain how it works though it may not be entirely or at all what you're looking for

anyway, MMF only has two native datatypes, strings and numbers (objects technically have "flags" which behave like booleans but are still numbers). MOST of the time (there are a few exceptions), you can tell which functions return strings as they'll have a '$' somewhere in the function name (and their menu entry will usually allude to it, such as "Get Name" or something); number returns won't have any special symbols

basically, the expression editor will ***** at you if you don't give it what it wants; actions that expect a number (will contain a 0 by default) will say something like "enter an numeric expression" while actions wanting a string (default will be "") will be "enter an alphanumeric expression"

you can't have mixed strings and numbers; if you need, for example, to set a string to something like: "Player X pos: 0", you'll have to convert the number into a string with str$(), so you'd end up with this as an expression: "Player X pos: " + str$(X("Player"))

sometimes strings can be converted to numbers using val(), but that's less common

basically, just play with it for a while and it'll make sense. the "Retrieve data from object" button is your friend