Re: [Bontz-team] text menu

[Chuck]

so what do you say shepherd?  you up for the challenge?
as you can see the mere mention of a menu/dialog system sets owen into a
frenzy!


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Owen Swerkstrom" <address@hidden>
To: <address@hidden>
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 12:49 PM
Subject: [Bontz-team] text menu


> > 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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