Experts please help

[DAH]

Hi Guys! I am really stuck here! I am a musician trying to create a simple program for learning the fret names of the guitar fretboard (there are others like this, but not how I like)

Anyway its quite a simple concept....here is a picture

http://img225.imageshack.us/i/fret.jpg/

anyway you start the game, there is a picture of a blank fretboard with all six strings....underneath are 12 active objects (the letters and sharp/flat)

and the Idea is that a Dot appears randomly on any of the strings at any fret, and then you have to click on the correct answer

ok thats the basic Idea of the game....heres how I have gone about it so far,

Firstly I thought my game could offer a string by string option so that you could just practice on the string that you find tricky, so this means for level ONE I would just need to make the dot appear randomly only on the first string

anyway what I did was first create a COUNTER OBJECT, and I set it so the maximum number it could reach was 24 and minumum was 1 (this is coz there are 24 frets and so thats 24 different fret positions)....seconds I created an load of events like this.....(please note that DOT represents an active object i created)

when COUNTER is equal to 1, position DOT at (here i placed coordinated to the first fret)

when COUNTER is equal to 2, position DOT at (here i placed coordinated to the second fret)

when COUNTER is equal to 3, position DOT at (here i placed coordinated to the 3rd fret)

and so on..........until I did 24 of them

anyway finally I set this.........

At start of level, set COUNTER to random generator (24)

which means the DOT now appears randomly on any fret of the first string

anyway way then I had to think how I would make it understnad when i have click on the right answer, so I set a new event saying

COUNTER = 1
+user clicks on active object F (because F is the note on the first string of the first fret)

and that would equal the following.......

set COUNTER random generator to (24)
set THUMB animation to thumbs up

please note(I have an active object called thumb that has an animation for thumbs up and also thumbs down)

anyway now I am STUCK, I cant work out how to do the programming for when you hit a WRONG answer

also can any experts tell me if I have gone about this all the wrong way?? I feel my lack of skill means I have done it all wrong!

please bear in mind when u answer that I may not understand anything really technical lol

Thanks

[DavidN]

I think the easiest-to-understand approach to this is one that takes advantage of the way that the events list in TGF is read from top to bottom - I'm not sure how familiar you are with how it works underneath, but this is how I'd do it.

- Create a new active object that covers the entire fretboard (I'll call it simply "Fretboard") and uncheck its "Visible at start" property to make it invisible.

- Set up an alterable value on an object somewhere - such as the first value of the Fretboard object - to use when detecting clicks (I'll call this "ClickCaught").

Then in the Event Editor, modify your existing events in this vein:

Counter = 1
+ User clicks on object F
+ ClickCaught("Fretboard") is equal to 0
-> Do events related to getting a right answer
-> Set ClickCaught("Fretboard") to 1

[All other similar "correct" events go here]

User clicks on Fretboard
+ ClickCaught("Fretboard") is equal to 0
-> Do events for getting a wrong answer
-> Set ClickCaught("Fretboard") to 1

Always
-> Set ClickCaught("Fretboard") to 0

What this does is make the Fretboard object catch any mouse clicks, but only after the dot (active object F) has had a chance to check for being clicked on. If the correct dot is clicked, then ClickCaught is set to 1, so the event that catches wrong clicks won't be run because it looks for ClickCaught being 0. And after the check has been done, ClickCaught is always set to 0 again so that the next time the frame is drawn, a new check begins.

[DAH]

Thanks David!! really apreciate the response! I am having trouble understanding it fully, I wondered if you could have an example for me, I have uploaded it here in a message to you (inbox)

then I could just continue to modify! of course I will credit you!

thankyou

[DavidN]

I got a chance to look at the file this morning and actually completely changed the way that I suggested above:

- Now, each note object stored its note name (C, C#, D, etc) in Alterable String A.
- When Group.Good is clicked on (the qualifier that all notes belong to), it sends Alterable String A of that object to a new String object, "AnswerString"
- The counter and string are compared against to see if there's a correct answer - if so, the AnswerString is set back to nothing and a new random fret is chosen
- If the end of the list of right answers is reached, and there's still something in the AnswerString object (it hasn't been picked up by any of the "correct" events), then it must be a wrong answer.

There's probably an even more efficient way to do it without the list of comparisons, involving a list of note names and comparing against the line numbers of that, but it takes a bit of reworking.