Actually, I hadn't programmed it that far, if you check the events. ^^ Being a total n00b, and looking at the Uploads board made me more aware of that than anything, merely making a selector thing was an amazing feat in and of itself for me.

And moreover, having it actually MOVE to a new item instead of instantly appear over it, and change SIZES at that was nothing short of impossible for my talent. So it's not supposed to be going much more than that.

I imagine I'll have to make more variables and events to handle selecting items and having options expand downward and such. I looked at some more files in this board, and... I have NO idea how to properly utilize Functions and whatnot. Looks complicated as hell. ;_;

So right now, I have a pause menu that you can highlight options with using a spiffy and nice-looking effect, but beyond opening up options and selecting stuff and DOING things, I doubt I'll get that far.

Although I made some progress today in that... if you highlight "Character" and press up, it sets the value to 3, and likewise, pressing up on "Abilities" sets the value to 0, and to my amazement, the highlighter moves and resizes appropriately for that. ^^ So that was neat.

So no worries, it doesn't go beyond that for this prototype. Considering how I've been coding this, it'd take another half hour or more to do the other selections. —@;

[quote:1gv1e4x3]Yes, everything you mention is of course possible. It all depends on how devoted YOU are to making them. I would recommend simplifying your menu; make something that you can easily understand and edit at will. Don't let the menu be the main design barrier of your game, as no one will care if something is simpler or expands in a certain way.

Well, I know, but I just want it to be all professional and stuff. Besides, I think THIS is going to be WAY harder than absolutely everything else I have in mind. I don't think gameplay in stages, or an overworld map is gonna reach this complexity. —@; Gameplay programming sounds easy compared to this whole thing. And it's really possible? o_O Huh...

[quote:1gv1e4x3]However if you really want all these features you should just sit down and logically rethink your approach. Somethimes things seem impossibly complicated, but more often than not theres a clean and simple solution which just needs to be discovered by rethinking what you did, what problems it has, and ideas for how to fix them. Hope this helps.

Thanks. ^^; I'll see what I can do. ^_^ Thanks for the encouragement. ^^;; I'm not that knowledgable, but... I'll see if I can figure something out. I'm not sure if I'm even imaginative enough to think outside the box for this, but I'll just... throw a few things around, experiment. ^^;

I'm going to mostly ask about if my code can be cleaned up and if my ideas are at all feasible. I had a pause menu idea for my game, and had something kinda working how I wanted. For an example of what I'm aiming for in terms of presentation... a SLIGHT idea of what I'm aiming for, I worked something out in this .cap in this topic.

But what I want to ultimately do is something like this:

<img src="http://i77.photobucket.com/albums/j42/Dreamer_Kisai/PauseMenuExample1-Normal.jpg">

If you try out the .cap, you'll see I have a basic video gamey menu selecting going on there. That highlighter thing changes size, and even moves from item to item. I'm pretty sure the way I'm doing it is WAY messier than something someone else can come up with.

But, moving on, we see here...

<img src="http://i77.photobucket.com/albums/j42/Dreamer_Kisai/PauseMenuExample2-CharacterSelectio.jpg">

We press "confirm" on "Character" and we see the list of characters we can switch to mid-gameplay.

If we were to scroll down to "Weapon" and press "confirm"...

<img src="http://i77.photobucket.com/albums/j42/Dreamer_Kisai/PauseMenuExample3-WeaponSelection.jpg">

The character selection closes up, and the weapon selection opens up. These are just... placeholder icons... whatever. Just to give you an idea of how things would go. And the highlighter thingy automatically highlights the first weapon in the list, since there's no reason for it to be highlighting "Weapon" anymore.

If we press up, the highlighter hovers over "Character". Press down, it highlights "Items". And if it returns to the weapons, it just highlights the weapon choices.

<img src="http://i77.photobucket.com/albums/j42/Dreamer_Kisai/PauseMenuExample4-ItemsSelection.jpg">

Here's where I think things might get REALLY complicated. An expansion of the menu into options the player might not have access to! I thought about this for awhile, and came upon the realization that in Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy games, if you go into the Item menu, there's several pages of blank lines that you can put the cursor over... But there's nothing there. I realised the programmers were making things easier by having an Item menu that has a set size, big enough to accomodate every possible collectable item in the game.

I would have to do the same I guess, by having a preset amount of blank spaces, and enough blank spaces to hold all the possible items.

Of course, how I'll do this in such a way that the items can be in ANY order, depending on acquisition, is beyond me. But then again, this whole plan is beyond my abilities. ;_; Hence why I'm asking if it's even POSSIBLE. —@

The highlighter thingy, as expected, highlights the first available item now, and its shape changes to accomodate the text size of the items as well.

<img src="http://i77.photobucket.com/albums/j42/Dreamer_Kisai/PauseMenuExample5-OptionsExpansion.jpg">

Nevermind that the text would scroll down past the border. I'll do a little "erase" trick deadeye showed me for that.

But here, we not only have an expansion for OTHER selectable things... but...

<img src="http://i77.photobucket.com/albums/j42/Dreamer_Kisai/PauseMenuExample6-OptionsExpansionE.jpg">

It becomes even more involved when selecting one of the possible customization options, expanding even further.

I'm not sure if these ideas are even possible, and my ideas get worse. —@; Before that though, I assume that there will need to be some preset re-positioning of all the text below whatever is currently selected. For example, you select "Weapon" and an event will need to fix the position of all the text below it a lower position.

I have no idea how I'll have the game keep track of... any of this... But here's how my idea gets worse...

For one, did you see "Resolution" there? I like full customizablity, so I'm going to allow the player to change the resolution of the game, weather it's full screen, or windowed, to a number of preset resolutions, and even allow for a custom resolution option, typing in whatever they want.

This would mess up this little pause screen window severely, either making it too big, or too small, so I wanna do something where the modal layout's size changes to that of the edges of the screen, and the borders of the menu change size AND position to match that, meaning there'll be an event to always say, "Put the borders and modal at THIS position and size porprotionate to the window.", keeping track of that "window edge" stuff or whatever.

And lastly, as if changing that highlighter thing's size and position to match the text wasn't bad enough, I wanna do a graphic with rounded edges, which probably means a seperate background tile for each corner, and each edge, and will have to move to the edges of the text, and expand in size as well, to make it look like an option is highlighted...

But that's enough for the MORE complicated stuff. This along sounds crazy as is. —@; Does anyone think this might be possible? Or should I just give up or something. ;.; If all else fails, I might end up having to ask someone to try making this for me. ><; But that can't work... What if there are any changes in the game design? New additions and whatnot? The menu will have to be tweaked to go with that!

But really, a menu like this, drop down options and stuff like that... Possible?

And as far as my more complicated ideas to go with this... Possible? I have no idea. ;_;

This is just to demonstrate the menu I had in mind for my game. A prototype, or a rough draft, if you will.

I'm not sure it was the .cap itself, because there WAS a transition to another layout, and it didn't cut off like it normally should, it just went on ahead, despite the fact I clearly clicked "Run Layout" instead of "Run Project" or whatever. ^^;; But I suppose I could try.

For some reason, if I try to run just a layout, it runs the whole project. Was something changed and they made it so that you can't run just a layout anymore, and HAVE to run the whole project?

Hey! That worked! Awesome! ^_^ Thankee. Now to fine-tune the background and eventually get started on more daunting tasks. Thanks. ^^

I was wondering if this is possible at all. I tried making a ause menu using a Layout object, and the Layout object itself is set to use transparency for the layout it links to.

This creatures a pause sign / menu with nicely rounded edges. And because it's on another layout, I wanted a scrolling background. So I made some bullet objects so that they were always moving at a 45 degree angle. Now I have a nice scrolling background.

The problem I have is that it looks awkward when pausing during normal gameplay. It's better to show than to tell...

http://i77.photobucket.com/albums/j42/D ... Screen.jpg

See up in the upper-left corner? One of the little moon objects that I've made a bullet object, scrolling along, looping back to the other side of the screen, is clearly giving away the little trick here and ruining the presentation. Is there anyway to make it invisible when its outside of the background somehow?

Alrighty, I posted it up. ^^; Sorry about posting it up twice, but the first time, it didn't seem to go through, so I just clicked to add it again.

And you guys think this might be a bug? Regardless, you can see what I'm talking about if you run the .cap and try pausing in rapid-fire succession. Just press Enter a bunch of times, and you'll notice the firing rate on the turret becomes faster and more frequent.

Then let it alone, and you'll see a big change as it returns back to its normal firing rate.

Um... what's the tracker? ^^;

I tried creating a pause function in this manner, since if I have a layout created as a model, I can have a small pause window on what's going on, effectively freeezing it, and since it's a layout object, I can have it linked to a "Paused" layout that can run a small menu.

The problem I have is that unlike when I was simply freezing the timescale and unfreezing it, creating a layout object seems to mess with the game's timing. For example, it messes up the timing on the shots from a turret, or messes up the animation on a sprite a little bit.

Is there any better way of making a pause function, or should I stick with this? I tried doing it this way, since I figured it would be better than trying to copy and paste a bunch of stuff onto each layout I'll need a pause function for.

It's not working for you either? ;_; That sucks... I wonder why...

And thanks for the suggestion about the order of conditions with that event. ^^; And I learned from your Platform School about how you can make new Event Sheets for totally different things to help make things run a little better. ^_^ So now I know.