I need help with a battle menu thingy

[Ganryu]

I have a list (not a window-type menu) that shows at most four entries at a time. By pressing up and down one can scroll through this list. This works perfectly.

Each entry has a name associated with it, and this name shows up in the list. Think of it like a battle menu from the Final Fantasy games because that's basically what it is.

However, things are complicated something fierce by the fact that each attack has a set of "tags" associated with it. Each tag is represented by a small icon that is supposed to be shown right after the name in the menu. There are about 10 different possible tags at the moment, but it will likely grow to 20-25 when i've gotten to plan more.

Each technique has about 4-5 icons associated with it. The problem is there are too many tags to simply opt to "hide" those not relevant. I need to basically make them stack after the name. That is, if one tag isn't used, that icon won't merely be invisible, but the spacec occupied by that image will be occupied by the next tag used. This way i optimize the use of space...

But how the hell do i go about to do it? O_o

The problem is also that when you scroll the menu, the icons must update as well.

[Ganryu]

Here's an image to clarify what i want. The icons aren't mine. I'm just using them to illustrate a point, they're made a japanese RPG-maker sprite artist.



Imagine that as the menu scrolls, so do the icons.

[lincore]

What you need are counter variables for every entry in your list.

Example:
Jiongu has only one "tag". But we check for everyone to make sure we won't miss any. First we set Character1TagCount (etc.) to zero. He doens't have Tag1 aka SPEED, so we won't do anything, but Tag2, ARCHERY. We paint the tags icon at the correct position. To find out what that position is, we assume that the first tag should be located at x160/y440 and every following tagicon should be 40px to the right. The result is this forumlas:
xposition = 160 + Character1TagCount * 40
yposition = 440

For the first Tag, this means a position of x160/y440, because 0*40 is nothing.
Now we increase Character1TagCount by one.
If Jiongu ever gets a new ability aka tag, we simply check for that, too. Since Character1TagCount is one, the new position of the tag icon is x200/y440. Just don't forget to set Character1TagCount to zero after you checked for all tags and characters.

I hope this helps you. Good luck and have fun,
lincore

[Ganryu]

Thanks. That helped a bit but the real problem is how i'm supposed to "paint" these icons out. If i wrote this in code i'd just blit everything, but that's not possible in MMF2.

I simply haven't found a way to allow me to create these icons without getting nasty bugs. For example, whenever the list is refreshed i need to destroy all the old icons and replace them, but this results in absurd bugs (like only one out of all the icons is destroyed) etc. etc. There has to be a smart way to display these icons as well.