Set media based on Variable name

[+Mzebonga]

I'm working through a scenario where I have three variables that could affect the cartridge that I'm working on. For argument's sake, let's call them myvar1, myvar2 and myvar3.

 

I'd like to change the image of an item (myitemA) based on the values of all three of the variables so I've created a separate variable (myvarX) that concatenates them and also ensures that they are stored alphabetically (thanks to a function). As far as I can tell, with 4 possible values for each variable, this gives me 20 unique alphabetised combinations.

 

I'm quite happy to make 20 images for each possible combination (it's a simple enough process) but I'm hoping to be able to avoid a long and complex IF statement to manage each combination.

 

Is there a way to effectively say:

 

zitemmyitemA.media = "zmediaitemA_"..var_myvarX

 

I speculatively tried this but wasn't particularly surprised that it didn't work.

 

Does anybody know a shorthand way to achieve what I'm trying to do or am I best doing it the long way?

 

I really appreciate any help you can give.

[Ranger Fox]

Instead of following the usual convention of having your media declared at the start of the cartridge, have you tried creating a new media object on demand and setting your item's media property to that?

 

The only worry I have with this approach is how the player app reserves memory for the media object. If the app stores the media file's byte array inside the media object upon instantiation, dynamically creating media objects could turn into a Very Bad Idea^TM. Instead, if the app only reads the media file when it's time to display it to the user (and doesn't store the byte array anywhere else), this would work fine.

[+Mzebonga]

Thanks for the thorough response.

 

I think the best plan at this stage is to stay in the shallow end of the pool and work it through as an IF statement. Maybe one day I'll be braver and try to build something a bit more elegant.

 

I really appreciate the feedback, though.