[Scripting Question] Custom Ability not quite working

[Szmygielski]

Hi, I just wanna start by saying that I love you guys and everything that you do here. Its really taught me a lot and I'm finally ready to venture out into the water on my own...

Or so I thought. I have been making a few fairly simple abilities, i.e. Slush Rush, and have had some success. My most recent ability though has been a tiny road block. I'm attempting to basically create the frozen type equivalent of Poison Point, Frost Bite(credit for idea goes to insertbrackets). So I copied the code for Poison Point and change a few things to do freezy stuff but it so far, hasn't been successful. In battle when a Pokemon would get frozen it results in an error message(attached below) and isn't actually frozen. I would really love some guidance and maybe I'd finally be able to give back to this amazing community. Attachments below

 

[mgriffin]

The error message says that you're passing two arguments but pbFreeze only takes one—the message.

You can tell it takes only the message because in PokeBattle_BattlerEffects there's this:

def pbFreeze(msg=nil)

 

[Szmygielski]

I got it. At first I was like wow, that didn't tell me anything. I wanted to respond with a big huh? But I decided to give it a looksie. I decided the code directly underneath what you pointed me to was the answer. The test was no good. So I looked again. I decided to go look at the Paralyze status. I see:

def pbParalyze(attacker=nil,msg=nil)

Okay cool. Then I go look at Burn:

def pbBurn(attacker=nil,msg=nil)

Neat.... Let's check Poison:

def pbPoison(attacker=nil,msg=nil,toxic=false)

Hmm. Hmmmmm. What do these things have in common? Obviously I don't need the toxic. And I already have the msg=nil. Sooooooooo, what if I added attacker=nil?

And presto! We got a frozen Pokemon! Wooo! mgriffin, you rock. Seriously. No hand holding, but you gave me exactly what I needed to know. Thank you so much I really appreciate it.

 

[mgriffin]

Your solution works, but generally speaking it's risky to add an extra argument to a function (particularly if it's not at the end) because there may be other places in the code that call pbFreeze.

For example imagine this code already existed:

if !target.hasType(:ICE)
  target.pbFreeze("Super-duper frozen")
end

Well your change would mean that attacker would be "Super-duper frozen" and msg would be nil, and the special message wouldn't display any more.

Luckily as far as I know Essentials never actually passed a custom message, so like I say, your change is fine. And please don't take this the wrong way, you did a good job investigating the problem and finding a solution!

Just for completeness sake, the change I would have made would have been this:

        if target.hasWorkingAbility(:FROSTBITE,true) && @battle.pbRandom(10)<3 &&
           user.pbCanFreeze?(nil,false)
          PBDebug.log("[Ability triggered] #{target.pbThis}'s Frost Bite")
          user.pbFreeze(_INTL("{1}'s {2} Frozen {3}! It won't be able to move!",target.pbThis,
             PBAbilities.getName(target.ability),user.pbThis(true)))
        end

All I did was take away "target" from the call, which is kinda the opposite of your change :)

But again, well done on solving it yourself!

 

[Szmygielski]

I appreciate the feedback. I will make the appropriate changes for completeness. This has been a wonderful learning experience and I truly appreciate you taking the time to teach me. Now I will continue to try build more and more elaborate abilities.