Customizing Menus

The translucent foreground menu is used for editing, behind is a preview of the in-game menu that you are editing.

Main Menu > Edit Menus

It is possible to customize the main menu and to make new menus.

However, (for now) built-in special menus such as Inventory, Status, Equip and such cannot be altered.
If you insist on wanting to change these special menus it is possible, with a great deal of effort, to reimplement most of the functionality of special menus with scripting (using slices) and then edit the in-game menu to open these scripted menus instead of the builtin ones.

Menu editor controls are straightforward and self explanatory, play around to see all that is possible.

Open menus in-game from Text Box Conditionals (attached to an NPC) or assign a hotkey using key is pressed plotscripting.

Menu Bitsets:

- Transparent box
- Never show scrollbar
- Allow gameplay & scripts
- Suspend player even if gameplay allowed
- No box
- Disable player closing menu
- Disable player control of menu
- Prevent main menu from opening
- Advance text box when menu closes
- Highlight selection background
- Remember selection when reopening

General menu appearance is far more flexible than for text boxes, such as for size, screen position, sentence spacing and font colour.

One of the main reasons for using customized menus is to bypass the two-choice limit on text boxes.

Menu Items

Submenu for Menu items editor

Select Edit Items which will give a better preview of the menu being edited. From here select a line to edit the contents.

Caption - is the text displayed, if left blank it will set to default.

Type & Subtype - what the menu item will do when selected. There are five types of menu items, the options are as follows:

1. Label - performs no special function and is used more for decorative or informative purposes.
Subtypes:
- Can't be selected except forcibly with a 'select menu item' script command.
- Disabled will NOT set tags or use bitsets, including toggling tags and 'close menu when activated'.
- Selectable can set tags or use bitset to close the menu.

2. Special Screen - these are the built-in special menus
[Items, Spells, Status, Equip, Order, Team, Map, Save, Load, Quit, Sound, Music, Volume (obsolete), Margins, Purchases, Fullscreen, Windowed].
Customization of these special menus is not available (yet). The only customisation currently possible is to change textbox styles and colours (in the User-Interface Colors and Box Styles editors) affecting the appearance of the boxes underneath the menus, and the text, in the Global Text Strings editor.

3. Go To Menu - jumps to another menu.

4. Show Text Box - Note that if the menu has the "allow gameplay & scripts" bitset turned OFF then the text box will not appear until after the menu has closed. You may want to use the "Close menu if selected" menu item bitset to avoid that problem. Also note that if the "allow gameplay & scripts" bitset is turned ON, the text box will appear layered underneath the open menu.

5. Run Script - As with text boxes, if the "allow gameplay & scripts" bitset is OFF then the script will not start until the menu has closed.

Each menu item can have two tags that determines if it is available or not.
They can also set tags, and unlike elsewhere, here tags can be repetitively toggled ON/OFF rather than just set once to one fixed state.

Menu Item Bitsets:
- Hide if Disabled, option that determines if a disabled menu item is greyed-out or invisible.
- Close menu when Activated
- Don't run on-close script

Extra Data does nothing alone and is used for plotscripting to pass arguments to a script.

See Also

• Box Styles
• Layers reference for the order in which different graphical things are drawn in-game
• How can I run a script instead of/before/after the menu comes up?
• Plan for converting special screens to slices
• How do I prevent the player from popping up the menu?
• Scripts:Radial Menus
• MENUS.BIN
• MENUITEM.BIN

HOWTO Chapters

Getting Started | Making Maptiles | Making Walkabout Graphics | Importing Graphics | Map Construction (Animating Maptiles) | NPCs | Text Boxes | Tags | Making a Hero | Items | Customizing Menus | Vehicle Use | Sound Effects | Distributing a Game

Battles | Stun, Regen, Poison, and Mute | Bosses | Making Complex Attacks | Combat Dialogues | Enemies that respond to a certain attack | Ways to refer to a hero in a script | Creating Dungeons | Conditional Door Links | Permanent Stat-Boosters | Creating Cutscenes | Using the Mouse in the Game | Making Android games