using a global vairable to activate a dialog option

[spaceoddity]

I've found a few posts dealing with this topic, but they seem to be around 6 years old, and haven't been much help, so I'm going to ask here. Apologies if this is redundant.

In Gabriel Knight, options in dialogs were often activated by finding a certain object or hearing a phrase from someone else. If you found a snake scale, you could ask someone about snake scales during a dialog with them, whereas that option would not be available if you had not found a snake scale.

How does one do that in scripting? For example, there is a painting in a house. The player cannot ask about the painting in a dialog unless he has looked at the painting.

So I set a global variable called "painting". When the player looks at the painting, it sets the "painting" variable to 1.

This is what I *want* to write in the dialog script:

@S
  if (painting == 1)
  {
  option-on 3
  }

However, that doesn't work, because its mixing the dialog scripting and regular scripting all together.

How would one go about doing it? Am I looking at it the wrong way? It seems like it should be simple...

[RickJ]

In contemporary version of AGS dialogs may contain AGS script,

Conversations
While the old Sierra games were mainly based on action and not talking, the Lucasarts games took the opposite approach. ...
   :
   :
   :
AGS now lets you put normal scripting commands in your dialog script, by indenting the line with spaces or tabs. For example:

@1
ego: "Hello. How are you?"
narrator: The man looks you in the eye.
  player.AddInventory(iKey);
  Display("This line is displayed from a normal script command");
otherman: "I'm fine."
return
   :
   :
ego: "Hello. How are you?"
narrator: The man looks you in the eye.
  if (player.HasInventory(iKey)) {
    player.Say("Actually, I'd better go.");
    return RUN_DIALOG_STOP_DIALOG;
  }
otherman: "Here's a key for you."
return

Your example doesn't work because you put a dialog instruction into an AGS script code block.   You should have used the script function SetOptionState(..) instead.

SetOptionState (dialog)
(Formerly known as global function SetDialogOption, which is now obsolete)

Dialog.SetOptionState(int option, DialogOptionState)

Changes whether an option in a conversation is available to the player or not. This allows you to add extra options to a conversation once the player has done certain things.
OPTION is the option number within the topic, from 1 to whatever the highest option is for that topic.

The DialogOptionState controls what happens to this option. It can have the following values:

eOptionOff
  The option is disabled - the player will not see it
eOptionOn
  The option is enabled - the player can now see and use it
eOptionOffForever
  The option is permanently disabled - no other command can ever turn
  it back on again.

Btw, use of a global variable can be eliminated by calling SetOptionState(..) from your script instead of setting a global variable.

[spaceoddity]

thanks RickJ! Everything's working great now.