ClintB

As it stands now, I would start off by creating a main menu panel. For a traditional top of the application menu, create and apply a flowlayout & adjust the hgap property to your liking. Fill this with labels or GUI_Object instances that you've applied sprites to. Though I will make an update shortly that will take care of this: the panels do not currently resize themselves to fit their contents. However, if you would like I can put a rush on this?

For each of these menu items, create a script that responds to the mouse_release event. When that occurs, have another panel you created - with the sub menu items in it - become visible. For each of these sub menu items in turn, listen for their mouse_release event and do whatever you want in response. I hope this helps

That makes sense, though I'm not really going for the traditional "Application" menu. More something like:


Applying what you said to the above, would each menu be a panel with a stack layout & the vertical gap between items set appropriately? I'm assuming that the panels can be drawn or placed on different layers to be drawn over each other in a layered manner, is that correct?

Thanks for the quick reply, I'll have to try out some tests and see what I can do with this.

This looks pretty awesome. While I've been scripting and programming for years now, most of my experience in GUIs is based on WinForms and a *little* bit of WPF and My only graphical game programming experience is in GM. So please forgive me if the following statements & questions are relatively (completely?) ignorant...

I've struggled to build even a foundation for a flexible menuing system (think RPG), as well as the GUI drawing and layout portion. This GUI API seems a bit like the layout canvas & panels in WPF, so I'm thinking that learning how to use it properly may take care of layout issues. Hmm...I guess my question is: Where should I start to try building (or properly using something available for GML users) a menu system that supports drawing layered submenus & "arbitrary" script/event calls from menu actions etc.? I hate being so ignorant that I don't even know which questions to ask.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Doh, File -> Preferences -> Editors... I think I saw a GML language parser/highlighter for Notepad++ somewhere. Have to find it again. Thanks for the answers guys.

We also should be able to do

i++;

Haha, I have to stop myself from typing 'for (i=0 ; i < someVar ; i++)' all the time. I agree that some additional features added to the language itself would be nice, like foreach looping & increment/decrement. Don't want to turn this thread into a language war though That said I do have to agree with:

I don't think GML should go anywhere near more professional languages. If you know C++ or Java, then you should be using those and not GML at all.

Thing is, though, what we're talking about here (i++, foreach, etc.) aren't 'professional-grade' features. I mean, foreach is more or less easier to understand than for looping with a counter, and an increment/decrement operator is ... well...just kinda standard. We're not suggesting delegate functions, lambda expressions, or anything else that's well beyond the understanding of the beginning programmer; we're just suggesting some 'basic' functions that *could* make writing code a little bit more straight forward in some instances and provide a smoother ramp to a 'professional' language should the user choose to pursue them. Anyway...<chant>not a language war not a language war not a language war</chant>

Language diversion aside, I'd love to see just a few more text editing features in the code editor like folding, search & replace (big one that), & tabs. While all these can be provided by an external text editor...we lose our code completion Even though it's a far cry from intellisense I find it competent enough to be helpful, especially when using constants etc. Oh well, I s'pose in the meantime I'll have to see how the external editing features play out...can't believe I didn't see those options before.

Thanks again, I really appreciate the help.

OK, thanks for the reply.  As for the quality, I've found that confining the shape to pixels of size 1-2 works pretty well.  And keeps the effects from looking "too nice" next to 16x16 sprites, haha.  Couldn't have come up with the effects nearly as quickly without this tool  

First let me say - Awesome!  Thank you for taking the time to put this together, share, and update it.

One question I have:  Is it possible to change the room/resolution/view port size?  I'm having a little bit of trouble judging size, etc. when going from PD to GM in a game I'm working on that's 320x240 up-scaled to 640x480 using views/surfaces.  Thanks!