[Bontz-team] text menu

[Owen Swerkstrom]

> hey shephard, i have a job for you...you want to
> develop a menu/dialog
> system using SDL for us???
> owen has been harrassing me about this for a long
> time.

I know I'm not Shepherd, but here's my two cents:  I
made a really generic class for drawing a text
box/menu, though it only expects to be called once (it
doesn't pick up and remember what's behind it etc like
a proper animated/layered thing should) it takes care
of the boring stuff like taking a string of text and
grabbing the appropriate chunks of the image file, and
drawing the border and all that dull stuff.  It still
needs to take on the responsibilities of a sprite
(dealing with being continually drawn and layered
"over" stuff) and animating the text being written in
(quickly, but not all-at-once like it is now).

Eventually we'll probably want to abstract the user's
input such that depending on whether they're in a menu
or the game they control the cursor or the character,
each behaving rather differently.  I don't know how
nuts we want to go with the cursor system, in terms of
allowing any object on screen to be "pointable" during
battle etc. but the cursor will always have a (linked
list?) set of things it can choose between at any
given time, and the arrow keys move it to the nearest
thing in that vague direction

(pardon the ascii art)
+---------------+ +---------------+
|    /          | |       \       |
|   /           | |        \ O   /|
|\ /            | |         \   / |
| X             | |  o       \ /  |
|/O\            | |     O     X   |
| o \           | |          / \  |
+---------------+ +---------------+
say this is during battle. the screen on the left
shows three interesting spots menu-wise.  The "X" is
the poity-finger cursor, say it's aimed at the word
"attack".  The "O" and "o" are other spots, near the
words "magic" and "defend", or something.  The "\" and
"/" lines separate regions, and the bottom region
happens to contain all the other cursor "spots".  So
if the player presses down, "O" is closest in the
"down" region and it gets the pointy-finger cursor. 
So the player makes the selection here and now the
cursor spots are on the enemy sprites on-screen (my
right ascii panel)  Very similar situation here.  Only
instead of pointing at stuff that's in a nice
organized text menu, where the whole region thing
seemed like overkill, now the pointer can jump between
any of the monsters on-screen, which can even be
moving and the cursor's behavior should be able to
adapt.

...uff.  I do write long messages don't i?  :^) 
Anyway what I was trying to get at is the
text/dialogue system itself will be relatively easy,
though the text/menu system will have deeper roots,
tying into the game's control handling (which should
be customizable) and probably the scripting, however
we figure on handling that.

*runs away and tries to act innocent*  Who, me?  What
huge ungainly message?  Where?

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