HintMenuclass

A hint menu. This same class can be used for the top-level hints menu and for sub-menus within the hints menu.

The typical hint menu system will be structured into a top-level hint menu that contains a set of sub-menus for the main areas of the game; each sub-menu will have a series of Goal items, each Goal providing a set of answers to a particular question. Something like this:

topHintMenu: TopHintMenu ‘Hints’;

HintMenu ‘General Questions’;
++ Goal ‘What am I supposed to be doing?’ [answer, answer, answer];
++ Goal ‘Amusing things to try’ [thing, thing, thing];
HintMenu ‘First Area’;
++ Goal ‘How do I get past the shark?’ [answer, answer, answer];
++ Goal ‘How do I open the fish tank?’ [answer, answer, answer];
HintMenu ‘Second Area’;
++ Goal ‘Where is the gold key?’ [answer, answer, answer];
++ Goal ‘How do I unlock the gold door?’ [answer, answer, answer];

Note that there’s no requirement that the hint menu tree takes exactly this shape. A very small game could dispense with the submenus and simply put all of the goals directly in the top hint menu. A very large game with lots of goals could add more levels of sub-menus to make it easier to navigate the large number of topics.

class HintMenu : MenuItem HintMenuObject

Superclass Tree (in declaration order)

HintMenu
MenuItem
MenuObject
` object[HintMenuObject](../object/HintMenuObject.html) object`

Subclass Tree

HintMenu
TopHintMenu

Global Objects

(none)

Summary of Properties

allContents isActiveInMenu title

Inherited from MenuItem :
bgcolor curKeyList curMenu fgcolor fullScreenMode heading indent isOpen keyList prevMenuLink topbarbg topbarfg topMenu

Inherited from MenuObject :
contents menuOrder

Inherited from HintMenuObject :
topicOrder

Summary of Methods

addToContents initializeContents updateContents

Inherited from MenuItem :
display enterSubMenu formatXML getChildIndex getKeysXML getNextMenu getPrevMenu getXML refreshTopMenuBanner removeStatusLine removeTopMenuBanner showMenu showMenuHtml showMenuText showTopMenuBanner

Inherited from MenuObject :
compareForMenuSort execute initializeLocation

Inherited from HintMenuObject :
compareForTopicSort

Properties

allContents

hintsys.t[485]

our list of all of our sub-items (some of which may not be active, in which case they’ll appear in this list but not in our ‘contents’ list, which contains only active contents)

isActiveInMenu

hintsys.t[460]

we’re active in a menu if we have any active contents

titleOVERRIDDEN

hintsys.t[432]

the menu’s title

Methods

addToContents (obj)OVERRIDDEN

hintsys.t[463]

add a sub-item to our contents

initializeContents ( )OVERRIDDEN

hintsys.t[473]

initialize our contents list

updateContents ( )OVERRIDDEN

hintsys.t[435]

update our contents

TADS 3 Library Manual
Generated on 5/16/2013 from TADS version 3.1.3