Tutorial Details:
Difficulty Level: Basic
Topics Covered: Using special moves and the action command in Mindscript and NQC.
Assumed Knowledge: The Basics, My First Program, Get Moving, Using Include, Lighting Up (Part 3), Making Noise
Written By: BILL LANE

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As we've seen Spybots have a number of pre-programmed sound and light sequences. In the same way they have pre-programmed movements. In this tutorial we will look at how to access these pre-programmed moves and how to combine lights, sounds and movements using the action command.

There are in all 38 different pre-programmed movements for the Spybot. They are grouped into 5 different groups and each group needs to be called by it's own command. If you're using Mindscript the commands and their movements are declared in utils.h and globals.h. If you are only interested in these movement commands you are best to include utils.h. But if you need more than that you'll need to use globals.h. But you can't include both within the same program. If you're using NQC then you'll need a copy of Mark Ferris's spyutils.nqh which you can copy from here.

It won't be practical to look at all 38 moves here. Nor is it really necessary. Most of the names explain themselves or will be explained by a brief test. Instead lets have a look at the 5 commands / groups and see how they work. The syntax for the five commands is as follows:

BasicMove(nMove, nTime)

FancyMove(nMove, nTime)

RandomMove(nMove, nTime)

SlowDownMove(nMove, nTime)

SpeedUpMove(nMove, nTime)

N.B. For NQC you will need to add a semi-colon at the end of each command.

As you can see they all have an almost identical format. The require nMove which is the name of the move you want to use and nTime which is how long you want it to run for. Note that if you send an inappropriate move name to a command it will just ignore. The other thing to note is that at the end of nTime the motor will not necessarily stop or return to it's original state. What it will do at the end of the time will depend on the move. Some moves ( e.g. moveRandomForward runs the motor for a random period of time and always stops the motors, moveForward leaves the motor running forward). So let's look at an example:

FancyMove(moveShake, 100)

In this example the Spybot will "shake" for 1 second. Among the other moves are the standard forward, backward, spin left, spin right. But there are some more surprising inclusions like zig zag, dance or moveBugForward.

As you can see these moves are easy enough to use. But they will be more effective if used with appropriate sounds and ARC light sequences. Spybotics provides a single command that allows us to co-ordinate all of these elements. It's the Action command and the syntax is:

Action(nSound, nDisplay, nMovement, nRepeat, nTime)

Most of these parameters refer to things we've already discussed previously. For example nSound requires a number between 0 and 79 (63 pre-programmed sounds and 16 user defined sounds) as explained in Making Noise. nDisplay can be any number 0 - 15 and refers to the pre-defined ARC light sequences discussed in Lighting Up (Part 3). nMovement requires one of the pre-defined movement names discussed above. The interesting thing here is that you can use all of them with action. Whereas with the group commands you needed to send the appropriate move names. nRepeat is how many times you want the action to repeat. nTime is how long you want each repeat to last (but the actual duration is dependant on the actions called). So here's an example:

Action(6, 6, moveShake, 1, 300)

This plays the shocked sound, with the alarm display while the Spybot "shakes". It will shake for 3 seconds and it won't repeat. Sure it's simple! But the results could be spectacular. So it's over to you.