menusys.t file | source file

TADS 3 Library - Menu System

Modifications copyright 2003, 2010 Michael J. Roberts

This module is designed to make it easy to add on-screen menu trees to a game. Note that we're not using the term "menu" in its modern GUI sense of a compact, mouse-driven pop-up list. The style of menu we implement is more like the kind you'd find in old character-mode terminal programs, where a list of text items takes over the main window contents.

Note that in plain-text mode (for interpreters without banner capabilities), a menu won't be fully usable if it exceeds nine subitems: each item in a menu is numbered, and the user selects an item by entering its number; but we only accept a single digit as input, so only items 1 through 9 can be selected on any given menu. In practice you probably wouldn't want to create larger menus anyway, for usability reasons, but this is something to keep in mind. If you need more items, you can group some of them into a submenu.

The user interface for the menu system is implemented in menucon.t for traditional console interpreter, and in menuweb.t for the Web UI.

Stephen Granade adapted this module from his TADS 2 menu system, and Mike Roberts made some minor cosmetic changes to integrate it with the main TADS 3 library.

Summary of Classes

`MenuItem MenuLongTopicItem MenuObject MenuTopicItem MenuTopicSubItem`

Summary of Global Objects

`menuOutputStream menuParagraphManager`

Summary of Global Functions

(none)

Global Functions

(none)

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