Game Development Community

Menu Opinions and possible help

by Cosmic Logic · in Torque X 2D · 07/19/2009 (11:29 pm) · 5 replies

Hey,

I'm trying to make a menu for my game and it seems there are a couple of different ways.

The menu I'm trying to make would be for my main menu. I want to have a couple of option sets. An instruction menu, controls change menu etc.

The two prominent ways I've seen on the forum are: using GUIs or using txscenes.

I really want to have the menu selector style to it. Having a little icon that moves up and down with the d-pad, going through menus.


The way I might be thinking is to create a set of GUI based screens (basically made up of guibitmaps and guitexts) that switch back and fourth and possibly having a code generated T2dStaticSprite with a component that deals with all code relating to moving up and down between items and changing values.

Or wait, I would have to make a camera that would render that selector object wouldn't I?

#1
07/19/2009 (11:46 pm)
Yes, those are the correct two choices. Their GUI system is almost completely undocumented, which is a shame because it is very powerful. I would hate to try and build that with T2D objects. I think I've figured out enough about the GUI system to put together a little tutorial next weekend on it. For the past two weeks, I've been almost exclusively tinkering with their GUI stuff because I wrote my game in T2D in about an hour, but getting a decent menu going seemed impossible.
#2
07/20/2009 (9:25 am)
@Jason:
In working with their GUI controls, have you found any good way to support the mouse? That seems like something that would be desirable, yet it's not very easy to figure out, at least for me. Particularly useful would be enter and leave events.

For a student game I did last spring, I ended up just writing a cursor component and did the whole interface with sprites and no GUI controls at all. Just seemed easier than trying to work with GUIs, though I may return to them in the future.
#3
07/20/2009 (10:25 am)
No. They've greatly simplified the UI model (over Torque) to only focus on keyboard and gamepad. It makes things a lot easier if you don't ever care about mouse (and on the console, you don't).

Unfortunately, if you do care, you are kind of "out of luck." They have a focus model for controls and it's easy enough to tab around and set focus on controls, they just don't have all the fussiness of things like:
* additional highlighting when a mouse overs something
* dealing with mouse capture issues when you click a button control but then move off the button's limits
* moving the mouse out of the XNA window in windowed mode
* converting mouse coords to and from GUI coords
#4
07/20/2009 (7:58 pm)
Alright. GUI it is. It will take some time to slag through, but it's a skill that should be learned.

I'll keep an eye out for that tutorial Jason, and many thanks.
#5
07/20/2009 (8:01 pm)
@Jason - If you know how to work custom fonts, that's definately something that I would be interested in.