Flight of the Giraffa – Update 2
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This week I’ve created Button class for our GUI. The button class works just like a collision box with a state. The state is either “pressed” or “not pressed” and is determent whether a mouse button is pressed and also if the mouse’s position is inside its bounds. This is what happens inside the function “SetPressed”. The statement can later be retrieved from a “IsPressed” function. The Second half of button, is the Reset function. It will reset the state from true to false, but if the button was previously pressed (and is still within its bounds) it will return true, and false if it was not. With this feature I can check if the user releases their mouse button. This will make clicking button feel like they were actually clicked and would allow the player to avert the cursor if they regret pressing a button. During run-time a button object would work like this: If a mouse press statement is true the set pressed function checks if the cursor is inside its bounding box. If that statement is true it will set the state to true (pressed) and will continue to be so until reset is called. Now draw functions can check this value and make the button appear different while pressed. Now reset is called and the state is set to false again. If I place reset in an if statement, I could execute a function whenever that statement id fulfilled(released). When working with the Scorched Earth clone I did not want to be restricted to a specific button size. So I used a method called “9-Slice Scaling”, which means that a button sprite is separated into 9 parts. Like this image shows:
A, C, G, and I are placed according to specified dimension. D is aligned to A and stretched vertically to reach G. The same goes for F but from C to I. B and H is stretched horizontally. To fill the gap E is aligned with A and stretched both vertically and horizontally to I. I implemented this in our game so we could have dynamically sized buttons with rounded edges or beveled texture.  |
