How To: ZSCRIPT MENUS?

[Major Cooke]

No worries.

That's just it though. Prevention from important things being overridden I suppose. That part I don't know fully.

[AFADoomer]

I edited after you posted... Maybe Graf can weigh in, then? I may do a feature request...

[Major Cooke]

No point. Graf will probably close it because either he cannot, or will not. For example, a will-not is the player menu: he kept all those functions internal to prevent abuse. A cannot: like the color picker menu, if it has a class, are just too complex so you cannot replace those either because it'll fuck things up. Your better off just replacing it on your own side and tell players "DONT use the internal menu!".

[Nash]

Ah.

Damnit, you're right. Sorry.

So what is the difference between me adding a new Class there and replacing the old class for PlayerMenu with a class that inherits from PlayerMenu? Besides "the engine won't let you"? Shouldn't the inherited class have all of the same underlying code as the parent class? Is this actually something that should not be done, or a holdover from the old system where everything was in compiled code?

I have had to specifically request which class of menus to be overridable inside MenuDef in the past (for example, the generic MessageBox was hardcoded until I requested it and it got approved)... so I think the best bet is, if you want a particular class to be moddable, you'll have to request it.

[AFADoomer]

Yeah, this was all good. I was mis-reading and mis-remembering code.

[Graf Zahl]

I edited after you posted... Maybe Graf can weigh in, then? I may do a feature request...

Please do. I do not feel like reading trough 2 pages of discussion to get to the bottom of it.

[Nash]

Can someone explain to me menu descriptors like I'm a 5 year old?

Despite being able to work with menus and produce somewhat usable widgets, I can't honestly say I truly understand the descriptor concept.

[XxMiltenXx]

Hey, I need some help.

I want to alter the look of a menu, but only a certain entry (or value).
From what I understand, the common way that menu items are drawn is like this:
Textures

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screen.DrawTexture (mTexture, true, x, mYpos, DTA_Clean, true);

Texts

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screen.DrawText(mFont, mColor, x, mYpos, text, DTA_Clean, true);

So, the whole menu uses the DTA_Clean tag. I simply want to change this tag to the DTA_320x200 tag, so that all menus use it. Is this easily possible, and if yes, how?

[Nash]

No, there's no easy way to do it. You'll have to rewrite almost every menu just to change its drawing API to suit your needs. Or copy/paste all of the stock menus. And run the risk of having outdated menu code if there are engine menu fixes upstream.

[XxMiltenXx]

Hmm ... tried that, failed miserably . Jk, but it kinda seems complicated for such a simple change...

Another question about the menus though: Where are the names for the menu items stored?

e.g. MENUDEF entry:

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	TextItem "Set it up!","o", "OptionsMenu"

In this case the OptionsMenu will be visually shown ingame as "Set it up!". Is that string accessible via a menu class in ZScript so I can use it? And if so, how?

[AFADoomer]

Each menu item is referenced in the menu descriptor's mItems array. You have to access the correct entry of that array, cast the item as the right type of control (ListMenuItemTextItem), and retrieve the mText value.

So something like this running in your list menu class's Init code should print the list menu text item values to the console every time the menu is opened:

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		for (int i = 0; i < mDesc.mItems.Size(); i++)
		{
			if (mDesc.mItems[i] is "ListMenuItemTextItem")
			{
				console.printf("%s",  ListMenuItemTextItem(mDesc.mItems[i]).mText);
			}
		}

If you want to select a specific item, you can experiment with the GetItem function - GetItem('OptionsMenu') should return the list item you use in your example (See the player menu for an example of this in action).



@Nash -

Can someone explain to me menu descriptors like I'm a 5 year old?

Despite being able to work with menus and produce somewhat usable widgets, I can't honestly say I truly understand the descriptor concept.

I will try... Apologies if this is either too basic or not enough.

Essentially, the menu descriptors are used to store specific information used by the overall menu - selector graphic and offsets, base drawing position, etc. Most importantly, it includes an array of all of the menu items that are part of the menu, as defined in either MENUDEF or internally generated code. So, this is how the engine keeps track of what items are supposed to be on a particular menu, and the particulars of how that menu is drawn.

[XxMiltenXx]

Each menu item is referenced in the menu descriptor's mItems array. You have to access the correct entry of that array, cast the item as the right type of control (ListMenuItemTextItem), and retrieve the mText value.

So something like this running in your list menu class's Init code should print the list menu text item values to the console every time the menu is opened:

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		for (int i = 0; i < mDesc.mItems.Size(); i++)
		{
			if (mDesc.mItems[i] is "ListMenuItemTextItem")
			{
				console.printf("%s",  ListMenuItemTextItem(mDesc.mItems[i]).mText);
			}
		}

If you want to select a specific item, you can experiment with the GetItem function - GetItem('OptionsMenu') should return the list item you use in your example (See the player menu for an example of this in action).

Thanks, this is the information I needed

[Sarah]

---

I'm trying to get Z-Windows updated to conform with the latest versions of the engine; quite a bit has changed. First things first, I'd like to get the Z-Windows Options consolidated into their own menu within Options. Below is a snippet of the current MENUDEF, which is the old and now/always incorrect way of doing this, as far as I understand right now. So what is the correct way of making a submenu and adding it to the Options menu that will be forward compatible? Please assume I'm 6+ months behind everyone else in experience with ZScript and need my hand held a bit.

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OptionMenu "Mouse"
{
	Title "Mouse"

	Slider "Overall Sensitivity",			"mouse_sensitivity", 0.5, 2.5, 0.1
	Option "Prescale Mouse Movement",		"m_noprescale", "NoYes"
	Option "Smooth Mouse Movement",			"smooth_mouse", "YesNo"
	Slider "Turning Speed",				"m_yaw", 0, 2.5, 0.1
	Slider "Mouselook Speed",			"m_pitch", 0, 2.5, 0.1
	StaticText ""
	StaticText "- Z-Windows Options -", 1
	Slider "Interface Click Sensitivity",	"zmse_clicksense", 3, 10, 1, 0
	Slider "Interface Cursor Speed Modifier","zmse_speedmodify", 8, 66, 1, 0
	StaticText " - Lower modifier value for faster cursor", 1
}

Update - Solved. I assumed this was going to require ZScript but a quick look at the MENUDEF documentation on the wiki showed that my needs are simpler. Z-Windows now has it's own options menu within Options!

[GiveOneMoreChance]

Hello, can anybody explain how to make scroll bars and possible convert int to string?

[ZzZombo]

Do I understand it right you can use this outside of main menu enhancements? Like to do "Do you really want to buy <item> for <price>?" during gameplay. If yes, how?