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Please avoid "wotzit" questions, as the readme (available on the download page) explains just about everything. There are demo scripts provided with the download. SuperVars is heavily used in The Black Market Mod, which is why I'm releasing it now. I've had SuperVars for about a year now, so it's heavily tested, I just kept it to myself for a while... Selfish.


And, here is a bonus: https://pastebin.com/46ayUR24

I call this Objective-SCM (difficulty: Brainfuck). Wotzit? It's a relatively low-level objective-oriented implementation for CLEO 4 (though it would only take replacing ALLOCATE_MEMORY to make it CLEO 3-friendly). Once you understand the example scripts given with SuperVars, this isn't too much to handle when using it but concentrate on the low-level source and your eyes may burn a bit. The source is pretty well commented, though. It's not included as part of the SuperVars example scripts as I consider it worthy of a bit more light, however this is a great example of SuperVars' power for this topic (its just best to see the example scripts with the download first).

Objective-SCM allows you to create your own virtual 'types' and create C++-like objects with them. For example:


@CCat, for example, can now be passed to @new (just like the C++ new, see the Objective-SCM :new source for more info) which initialises a 12 byte structure, or an array of 12 byte structures:



@CCat_ctor is a constructor (0 is the destructor param, use 0 to not use a constructor/destructor), which will be automatically called by @new after allocation, or in the case of an array, will call the constructor for every object in the array after allocation:



Here we have a constructor setting the default (initial) values of a 'CDog', 'CCat' or 'CAnimal'. It also sets a 'virtual table', so lets have a look at them...



Note that the first field of the VTBL must be a pointer to the object base VTBL. Actually, you could also have the first field point to another virtual table, and have that point to the object base VTBL, and so on...



So calling GetNumLegs with a cat would return 4, for a dog it would also return 4, but for a human it would return 2.

But for 'Speak', different animal classes have to use different methods, as they all speak differently. If we knew our object type was definitely a CDog, we could just do:


However, the idea of a virtual table is that we could also have a different VTBL for a similar object, but we could still call the same method:


If 1@ is a CCat, it will print "Miaow", if it's a CDog, it will print "Woof" and the default method is "Hello", which will cover a CHuman and any other CAnimal-based type which is created without it's own unique VTBL.



Don't worry, lots of confusion and questions are expected, unless you are both a CLEO and C++ pro, so fire away.

Cheerio.

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Is this going to slow the game down a lot? Adding classes to SCM seems to be a bit overkill imo.

Only if you add so much CLEO code that the game would become slow anyway. It's just using arrays with a memory address as a base pointer. Besides, Objective-SCM is just a fancy show-off bonus of SuperVars, so it's not really about having classes in CLEO but having the ability to create such epic things with SuperVars, and that's only my imaginations limit so far... Most of the work is done exe-side and uses less memory than the PRINT opcode

For me, yes it slowed the game down.

^ignore.

If it is posssible, could you give an example of iterating through an array with a for loop using SuperVars?

So it's basically just like iterating through a normal array:


You could change the 4s in the array to a different value to change the multiplier (so it would increment by 8 bytes if you used 8s), just remember that most value operations work with 4 byte values regardless.

Aside from a few additional supporting features, that's basically the in and out of SuperVars. You assign a memory location to any var and the variable 'becomes' that memory location. All is explained in the readme as well as methods for making it easier to write.