In-Game Pause + Menu

[Kris]

I need help in finding a way to pause the game frame and all of its events, and then display a menu on top of it, wich will be similar or equal to the Main menu that appears on the first frame of my application.
Then, when closing the menu, all events should unpause to continue the game normally.

Help, please?

[DavidN]

You can do this easily by using a sub-application. Details on how to do it are here:

http://www.clickteam.com/epicenter/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Board=2&Number=51398

[Kris]

Thanks, I'll try that!

[Kris]

Ok that did it wonderfully!

But I got another question:

Is it possible to set the background of that in-game menu to transparent?

[LB]

Try useing the window shape object.

[Dines]

There's a niftier way, which allows alpha transparent menus using Subapp.

Use Screencapture object to take a photo of the screen just before opening the menu. Like this:

ESC IS PRESSED
- Capture: Take Snapshop of Frame
- Special: Create "MENU Subapp" at (0,0)

This will take a photo of the screen JUST before it creates the menu.

Then inside the Menu Subapp's code, create an Active Picture Object and set it behind everything else.

START OF FRAME
- Load picture from appdir$+"tmp.bmp"

That's pretty much the gist of it.

This will take a snapshot of the game and display it in your menu. Your menu can then contain objects with alpha-channels, like buttons or backgrounds or whatever, and it'll LOOK like they're softly blending with the background.

The user won't know it's a workaround.

This has served me well for years!

[neat_Kliker2]

all we really need is for the capture object to be able to ouput to memory in either JPG or PNG and for the image manipulator to be able to get and put to RAM, like Capture object > Image manipulator > alpha channel

[Dines]

But in the meantime, my way works fine

[Brovic]

all we really need is for the capture object to be able to ouput to memory in either JPG or PNG and for the image manipulator to be able to get and put to RAM

Well capture object can already output to clipboard and the image manipulator can read from it! But no graphic extension can import from memory so anyway you need to swap to disk.
But I found a cool effect mixing image manipulator and perspective object to improve Dines technique :Tranparent Pause & FX

[neat_Kliker2]

Alpha Channel can ? :S
ah image manipulator can't output to memory or clipboard, shame :\