Suggestions on how to pause during an inventory?

[mobichan]

I am looking for suggestions on how to approach pausing the game action while the player is in an inventory menu/screen. Normally, I would do this with a sub app set to modal that contains the inventory. But I am trying to set this up for a Java/ Flash exportable game, so sub app isn't an option.

Any suggestions?

Mobichan

[nivram]

You may get away with making a custom inventory box, place all your events in groups. Then when you make the inventory box appear, deactivate the groups and activate them when the box is is not visible activate the groups. Just a thought.

Marv

[mobichan]

I was thinking along those lines initially, but then the animations and movements of the objects are not paused, so an object that is moving or animating already would not stop. And it seems like a major pain to store all the objects that were moving and stop/restart them when you finally leave the inventory.

[danjo]

if this is a feature you want, then organizing at the very start helps a lot.
put all your game code in one group - it can be broken into subgroups etc.
put your invent group in another.
keeping it neat- i usually have a small group to control both these for pause.
you can disable the game group, and also use [stop animation] on any object that animates and [stop movement] for moving objects.
once the game group is enabled, [start animation] & [start movement]

its as simple as just having a line that checks if game group is enabled or not.
this is what i do in most my games that pause, its very easy and it works flawlessly. miner2049er- being the last one i did that exact thing with.

[nivram]

You have to manually event the animations and moving to stop. You can do that on the same event you make the custom screen appear. Do the opposite on the same event to have the custom screen disappear.

Marv

[mobichan]

Thanks for the idea. I already use a lot of groups, so it should be easy to disable chunks of code. I just hope that a global "start anims/movements" doesn't cause any issues.