October 3, 1999

Dear OKScript User,

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There have been two minor bug fixes and one enhancement to
OKScript since the last newsletter. Quite a few help file
improvements have also been made. If these issues affect your
scripts you can download the latest revision from
http://home1.gte.net/yweare. Your existing license will
automatically be active on the new software if you install it
to the same directory, otherwise you will have to re-enter the
registration data (or copy the okscript.ini file from the
folder where your licensed program was installed.) The current
build is dated Oct 3, 1999. Click Help | About to determine
the date of your copy of OKScript.

The bugs that were attended to involved an anomoly in the
PARSE instruction and the addition of a delay after all window
activations to ensure that the focus has changed before
continuing with the script.

The enhancement addresses an (OKbridge) issue that I am
frequently asked about: 'How can I send my alert messages to
both the spectators and the opponents?' The easy, but not
completely satisfying answer to this is to use the area in the
OKbridge's bidding box designed to accept alert text, and
which does, in fact, get sent to both places. The downside of
this strategy becomes clear when you forget to alert and you
want to send the message out belatedly, but can't because the
bidding box is no longer available. Until now, the workaround
was to have each BUTTON declaration consist of two highly
redundant lines, e.g.:

  BUTTON 1C red OKbridge =16 or more points{enter}
    PUT %16 or more points{enter}
    
which rates about 2 on the 1 to 10 elegance scale. A better
approach was to use a procedure to perform the alerts for this
and similar buttons, something like:

  PROC alert
    WINDOW OKbridge
    PUT =%-arg1%{enter}
    PUT {%}%-arg1%{enter}
  BUTTON 1C red
    CALL alert ,16 or more points
    
This is better because the message only need be entered once
and is massaged appropriately by the PROC into two messages,
but the visual flow of the script is broken by the need to
have two lines for every BUTTON.

The enhancement allows for a consolodation of the BUTTON and
CALL instructions into one line. This was accomplished by
adding a second style of BUTTON instruction while retaining
compatability with existing scripts. This new form replaces
the "window" and "text to send" fields with the PROC name to
call and an argument list. OKScript distinguishes between the
two forms by requiring an asterisk (*) before the procedure
name in the second form. In the example above, the 1C BUTTON
can now be implemented on one line with:

  BUTTON 1C red *alert ,16 or more points
  
To use this technique simply include the code for the "alert"
PROC in your script files. This enhancement also applies to
the RIGHT and MENU instructions. For more information on this,
and on PROC and CALL techniques, see the help file.

Bug reports, suggestions and topics you would like to see
written about are always welcome at yweare@gte.net, or post
them to the message board at the web site. Thank you again for
using OKScript.

Michael Mardesich
okb://mikezzz
yweare@gte.net
http://home1.gte.net/yweare