Esx commands

es_x versions of EventScripts functions do not expand variables such as server_var() or event_var().

Warning

For anyone new to EventScripts, 95% of the time you should be using the normal commands. It's recommend that newbies stay away from es_x commands entirely until they get more experienced and understand them. These commands only make things a little faster, but they can cause all sorts of issues if you're not careful with them.

Overview

Basically this means that if you did this example:

es_msg The gravity is server_var(sv_gravity)

It would 'expand' the server_var(sv_gravity) part before executing the command. So es_msg would broadcast the following message:

The gravity is 800

If you instead use the es_xmsg command, it will just treat the line as a lump of text and won't expand or read any variables you reference.

So this bad code:

es_xmsg The gravity is server_var(sv_gravity)

wouldn't do anything with the 'server_var' and just output this (which really makes no sense to anyone):

The gravity is server_var(sv_gravity)

Why use es_x commands?

In cases where you are 100% certain that you won't need to expand variables, es_x commands can be used to improve performance of your script. Let's say we wanted to create a variable with a particular hard-coded starting value:

es_setinfo MyVar 33

In the case above, we're not using server_var and event_var, so it'd be handy if we had a way to tell EventScripts not to look for them. This would speed up performance.

This is where an es_x command would come in handy:

es_xsetinfo MyVar 33

Now the line will run a few milliseconds faster.

The most common case to use es_x commands for performance is when working with if then commands. The [[if] command automatically expands all variables on the line, so any command in the then half could be an es_x command. For example:

if (server_var(gravity) notequalto 800) then es_msg Gravity is not normal! gravity: server_var(sv_gravity)

Since the if command goes through the entire line and expands variables, it's already expanding all of the variables es_msg needs in the last half. So you could make the line slightly faster by changing es_msg to es_xmsg in this way:

if (server_var(gravity) notequalto 800) then es_xmsg Gravity is not normal! gravity: server_var(sv_gravity)

The output would be the same, but the speed would slightly increase.