Making Checkboxes Appear in a Readable

[Ishtvan]

Is there a way to make checkboxes get checked off in realtime by an external script? I would like to have a list of melee combat drills that the player has completed successfully. It doesn't have to be a frobable readable, it can just be a large GUI that the player can read from afar, like a board on the wall. I just want it to display GUI text and a check box that gets checked off.

 

I know we can have a menu gui with boxes that get checked off, but how hard is it to do with an ingame GUI with an external script telling it when to check off the boxes? Is there any guide I can read to learn how to set this up?

 

We had that one experiment with an ingame objectives list... I can't remember if that was checked off in real time or not?

[greebo]

You can access GUIs by using scriptevents à la $entity1.setGuiFloat(guiHandle, 3.2). The guiHandle is an integer referring to the GUI layer (the player has multiple GUI layers), whereas regular entities should have max. 3 GUIs, starting with handle 1.

 

You can load specific GUIs by calling $entity1.createOverlay("guis/melee_trainer.gui", 1) and saving the handle. Then use that handles for the other events. In the GUI you need some if-else code in a named event, which you can call from the script as well.

 

I've never tested it with an entity other than the player, but it should work from what I remember.

[Ishtvan]

Okay, thanks for the info. I will try that.

[Ishtvan]

Hmm, I know nothing about guis. If I want a GUI to do this special stuff, can I still use xdata to put in the text fields next to where the checkboxes will be, or do I have to do everything from scratch?

 

I guess I should probably look at the objectives GUI if that is the case, since it is most like what I want.

[greebo]

Readable GUIs and objective GUIs are handled differently. The readable scriptobject is taking care of loading the xdata into the GUI, there is some example code in there.

[Ishtvan]

Okay, I will try that.

 

Another question: I vaguely remember that we took out the old D3 ability for the player to switch focus to an ingame GUI and point & click within that. Is that correct?

 

The application is I want to provide a list of possible melee drills/opponents, somehow let the player select one of them out of the list, and put in a check box in it if that one has been completed successfully.

 

For the selection, I'm probably just going to do a set of buttons lined up with/sticking out of the surface of the gui. I briefly entertained the idea of doing some kind of point & click selection like you could do in Doom3, but I thought we may have taken out that functionality to "focus" on ingame guis. Also, a cursor looks kind of cheesy in TDM. I then thought about doing something like showing a model of a quill pen moving around normal to the gui surface instead of a 2d cursor, but if I tried to do that, this task probaly wouldn't get done before 2011. So it's probably going to be frobable buttons next to / on top of a non-interactive GUI.

[Crispy]

Sure you're not overthinking this? Why can't the player just look at a poster on the wall and track their own progress? It would be a lot easier and quicker to set up, leaving you free for other things.

[Springheel]

Sure you're not overthinking this?

 

My thought as well.

[Ishtvan]

Tracking progress is the first step, but I also want to let them hit a button to jump to a particular drill or opponent. If they've already played the training map some, then had to quit without saving, I don't want to force them to go thru the 5 previous drills/opponents to get back to the one they were working on. A simple frobable button off to the side will work though.

 

Unless I'm misunderstanding you and you mean just don't put up check boxes at all? I think it would get hard for the player to remember looking at the list when there are 10 possible drills or so and you have the option to jump around in the list. A check box would be helpful.

[Crispy]

I just don't see the point in going to all this trouble merely so players can manually check things off on a GUI. Firstly I'm not convinced that people will actually do it. Secondly, for the rare player that does want to, just make them use paper or something. (Real-life paper, I mean!)

 

Having selection buttons and "currently selected" lights does 90% of what you're after with 10% of the effort. You could also set the light brightness to, say, 25% of normal when it turns "off", to indicate that it's a previously-visited state. While that doesn't allow players to manually track which drills they've actually completed (just started), it does provide an automatic approximation which should be close enough.

[Ishtvan]

I think there's been some miscommunication. I don't want them to manually check things off, I want the check marks to appear automatically to track progress, just like the brightness change you were describing.

 

The only interactivity should be clicking a frob-button to choose which drill or opponent to jump to. When I went off on a tangent about clicking things with a quill pen, that's what I meant, clicking on them to "order up" that drill. I was imagining a second check box next to teach option they would click to "fill out their order," to go play that option, but that is completely unnecessary, we can just use standard frob-buttons.

[Crispy]

OK, I see. In that case, I would say just use lights for that, unless you can get the checkboxes done really quickly.

[Ishtvan]

By lights you mean lights pointing at the list that turn on subsequently as you move down the list? There may be 10 or so entries, so it could get hard.

 

I think checkboxes won't be so bad because we already have the assets from the main menus. I have a check image and a box image, and greebo told me how to turn the check image on. The hard part for me is learning how to put a GUI into the game in general, sort of from scratch because as I understand it, our pre-scripted readables aren't flexible enough for this? After that, I can edit the GUI code & map script pretty easily, and it should go faster than it would take to keep talking about it.

[Crispy]

Yeah, that's what I meant (re: lights).

 

If you reckon this is the most efficient way to do it, be my guest. Happy to be proved wrong.