I've been working on designing an experiment in Psychopy, and I am running into some problems with the interaction between my conditions file and a text element. I am trying to get my conditions file (CSV format) to specify the position of two text elements (the variables are "NowPos" and "LaterPos"). In the CSV file, underneath the headers, I have two different coordinate pairings listed. In the "position [x,y]" field of the text element conditions, I have written "$NowPos" (or "$LaterPos", depending on the element). With this, I intend to direct PsychoPy to read the specified variable from my conditions file, which is placed in a loop outside of the routine that calls for the variables it contains. However, it appears that the code automatically compiled by PsychoPy is trying to define "NowPos" and "LaterPos" at the beginning of the program. Because of this, they are undefined at the time that PsychoPy asks for them, causing my code to fail.
Do you have any ideas for getting PsychoPy to look for the right conditions file immediately? Could I have formatted something incorrectly?
Next to the position field, you need to select an option like "Set every repeat", so that a new position value is accessed on every trial.
The problem you describe sounds like you have left it at the default setting of "Constant", in which case the value only needs to be set once, at the beginning of the experiment. At that stage, as you note, the loop hasn't been created, thus its variables haven't been defined, and aren't available to refer to.