Pause Tutorial

JGary321

The community here has helped me with many problems. I figured I would give back by doing a tutorial on how to implement a "Pause" system. This is how I did mine. I am sure there are many ways of doing it. To alot of people all this may be common sense, but I'm sure some will find it helpful. I am not a pro at writing a tutorial, so bear with me. Also I am at work, so I am going by memory. Also if anyone has questions about setting up a Pause system, please ask them hear. Maybe we can get something similar up on the "How-To" Wiki...

Without Furtherado::

First thing you need to do is set a "Boolean" Game Attribute. I called mine "Game Paused". I have it set to 1 (so the game starts paused).

Second for each moveable actor you have to setup a Pause Rule. This is done wherever you have the Move command on the actor. For example, I have it so my enemy mobs randomly choose a location to move to toward my castle. I place that "Move-To" command within a rule that states (actor attribute changed, game.Game Paused = FALSE). If you have an animation for the actor that also goes under that rule.

What this does is that if the game attribute Game Paused = 0(false) then the actor moves/animates as normal. Otherwise it stands still.

You basically do this for every actor that can be changed. For instance I have a game attribute called Game Time. My Game Time starts at 30 secs & I used a timer that says every 1 second that game.Game Time = game.Game Time -1. (this deducts 1 second every 1 second) I put that timer under a rule that says (actor attribute changed, game.Game Paused = FALSE). So essentially the Timer only works if game is not paused.

I also made a text box that shows the Game Paused=True, that says "Game Paused". I made a second by right under that that says "Tap to Continue". I created an attribute that says when the text box is tapped to changed game.Game Paused-False. (this unpauses the game)

Bah, that stupid text box is still there! That's easy let's Destroy it after the game is unpaused.... Not a good idea. I guess technically you could destroy/respawn when it is un paused, but i took the easy way out. See that Otherwise part of your Rule? The one that most people don't ever use?? Well I created another text box. In the text box I put a "." & then made is translucent, so you can't see it. Less work on my part, but you can do it either way.

You can now also setup a button that if game.Game Paused = 0, change attribute game.Game Paused = 1. You don't need to setup then pushing the button again, b/c we already set that up in the text box.

That completes my tutorial, I know it's probably not the best written, but hopefully it will help someone. I plan on creating more tutorials on different things, if everyone likes this one, (& if it's ok with the moderators). Thanks guys for the support you have shown me, hopefully this helps in some way.

-JGary

CodeMonkey

Hi JGary321,
If you want, you can add this to the wiki how-tos.

quantumsheep

Thanks JGary321, that's a very interesting read, and could be really helpful to people.

I was thinking of something along the same lines but for a sound on/off function!

Would be very interested in reading more!

Thanks again!

QS

JGary321

Bah, I just noticed that the tutorial was larger than supposed to be. I was writing it in google docs & I double pasted. Sorry. Can't edit now.

Also, went ahead & threw this up on the tutorial wiki.

ktfright

nice, do work man!!!

CodeMonkey

Thanks JGary. I gave it a title header and added the link to the how-to page. Also removed the duplicate page.

http://gamesalad.com/wiki/game_pause_tutorial

JGary321

Ok, thanks for the edit.

ktfright

mybad JGary, im acting so N00B today, but with your pause tutorial, could this apply to an accelerating actor like my car, because i see on your tutorial that it applies to actors that have "move" or "move to" attributes

JGary321

yup, you know where your rule is for accelerating? For instance, If key pressed = up accelerate 90, or something to that effect. Well make it something like

If key pressed = up
If game.pause = 0

Then accelerate...etc...

Now the one thing I 'don't know is how well it will resume. Like if the car will start back over at speed 0 or what. So lemme know how it turns out.

alias_noa

So you mean you just change the "moveable" boolean to false when the game is paused? Because I tried that and it just doesn't seem to work.

BarkBarkCo

That's not what they are saying at all. Moveable cannot be modified during runtime. They are putting all of the move/move to behaviors in a rule that requires game.paused to be false. When game/paused is true, no movement would happen.

AfterBurnett

So this works with timers too? All of my enemies are spawned with timers... I wonder if I could get this to work... hmmm...

JGary321

@Poly - Pause works with timers. Just need an extra step to do it. You need to create an integer called timer in your actor.

Your timer rule would be

If game.paused = false then Every 1 sec self.timer = self.timer-1.

The spawn rule would be
When self.timer = 0 then spawn actor & change attribute self.timer = (whatever the initial spawn time is)

Make sense??

AfterBurnett

Yeah... MIGHT be able to get it working. It's a VERY fast paced shooter with rules such as "for 10 seconds, every 0.7 secs spawn enemy x). Could be tricky.

JGary321

With something like that you just need:

If self.timer > 0 & game.pause = false then every .7 secs spawn enemy.

AfterBurnett

AH okay, cool! I'll implement it in an update. Thanks heaps!