Context Menu

Context Menu

Rather than have a full-on RTS style button grid at the bottom of the screen, Cultura will have a minimal menu presence. The game will rely on intuitive RTS control scheme (left click selection, right-click action) and a small tutorial to teach it. So it relies on established gamer knowledge and standard UI implementation. For everything else it will be done by a context menu. You right click anywhere and the context menu shows up.

In Cultura, it uses CEGUI and it uses Ogre3d and those two combined means they must communicate with each other. The actual context menu exists in CEGUI. The effects it has on the game and the RTS interface exists in Cultura code (which uses Ogre3d). That means I need the CEGUI component to communicate with the Cultura component. Now, since I have yet to implement an event system it entails a bit of tight coupling.

The Cultura component handles when to show the context menu and then "gives up" handling mouse events. The CEGUI component is informed that it should show the context menu and properly attaches listeners to various mouse events to buttons pressed. When a left click occurs that is outside the context menu, the menu is hidden and control is returned to the Cultura component. By control is returned, I mean the Cultura component now understands that the context menu is closed and therefore goes back to its original handling of mouse events. This means that on the first left click outside the context menu, the context menu is hidden, but no unit selection occurs. I think that is actually somewhat expected. The primary issue with making it any more complex is that because I cannot guarantee order, in a reasonable manner, of how an event is handled, the CEGUI component simply either handles the mouse click or it does not through all its possible listeners and the Cultura component can be blind as to what happened and simply waits for control to return.

The context menu currently only allows the construction of buildings, it will eventually include empire management options. Also it will probably become a radial menu and at the very least, use icons instead of text (but have text tooltips). If a build is selected, the menu then shifts into possible buildings that can be built (based on faction technology) and then if a building is selected, it then returns control to the Cultura component which then handles the placement of the new structure.

In the Cultura component, it will have a transparent version of the structure sitting at the mouse cursor locked to the closest game grid square. Left click means to place. Right click is to cancel everything. There is shift-click to place multiple buildings. Each placement of a building queues a faction-level action in the faction's action queue. In the faction class' updateTick() method, it will attempt to assign jobs to idle civilians (who work for the government directly). That can be more complex later in the game when there are more complex government options.

Eventually you will need a way to cancel actions and also to requeue actions if civilians are interrupted and stop doing a job, that job needs to be requeued.

I will finish "factionActions" in the next post!