Best way to make a weapon selection system tied to mouse wheel

[Jarred]

Ok, here's what I'm trying to accomplish. On mouse up and down, I want the next weapon or previous weapon to become available for use (this was actually easy to accomplish). I set up the weapons in numbered order (i.e. 1 = regular, 2 = spread, 3 = rapid) and moving the mouse wheel up or down would change the weapon selection counter +1 or -1, enabling the weapon for use.

My issue now is what if one of the weapons wasn't available and I want to skip over it? Let's say 'spread' wasn't available for selection and I moused up from blaster. I want to skip over the unavailable '2' and go to the next available weapon which is '3'. If '2' and '3' weren't available, it should loop back to '1'.

The only way I can think to accomplish this is in a referential database but that doesn't look possible in MMF2. How do others accomplish this? Thanks!

--Jarred

[Del_Duio]

What I'd do is compare the current weapon setting against a global value associated with each potential weapon.

Example:

If (mouse wheel is rotated down) and WHEELCOUNTER = 2 and SPREADGUN = 0 then WHEELCOUNTER = 3
If (mouse wheel is rotated down) and WHEELCOUNTER = 3 and RAPIDGUN = 0 then WHEELCOUNTER = 4
If (mouse wheel is rotated down) and WHEELCOUNTER = 4 and LASTPOSSIBLEGUN = 0 then WHEELCOUNTER = 1

and etc.

This way if you put these comparisons before the actual part that assigns the guy the gun, it will skip to the next available gun you possess, and if you get to the end of all the possible guns then it circles back to your regular gun that's always owned.

This may not be the best way to handle it, but that's what I'd do.

[Jarred]

I know your solution would work Del, but I was hoping to avoid that

There's got to be a way to do this where I can have an infinite number of weapons and don't have to account for every possible scenario where 1 isn't available.

[Del_Duio]

Beats me but I'm sure there's a way to do it.
This place has loads of programming Gods, they just have to come down from the clouds and see this thread

[Jeff]

Idea: Should work but I didn't actually try it

You would need to add your weapon data to a hidden list box
As you scroll the wheel you select the next item in the list when it gets to the end of the items in the list box you jump back to the first item
(Or last item in the list if your scrolling the other way)

As you scroll you retrieve the data from the list box and parse it out to get the details of the selected line.

I might go build a little example of this seems pretty cool.

[schrodinger]

^^ what Jeff said

or a good old array,
where X index would be weapon type,
Y0 value would be "available/not available"
(Y1 if needed would be player no#)

...that and some nice fastlooping
avoiding empty Y0's and jumping from >dimx to first valued Y0 line shouldn't be a problem!

[nivram]

Jeff. Your method does sound really cool. I shall sit at the computer until your example shows up. he he.

Marv

[Jarred]

Thanks All. Now I feel dumb I didn't know arrays were an option (which makes perfect sense as a method). I was originally going to make my own array with nothing but variables but that was a disaster.

I'm going to start putting this together but I could probably use some help with the fast looping syntax to make X++ where Y=0.

[SoftWarewolf]

it's actually very easy, you just need to store which way you are going.

wheel-up: set scroll to 1, set weapon +1
wheel-down: set scroll to 2, set weapon - 1

current weapon unavailable, and scroll = 1: set weapon +1
current weapon unavailable, and scroll = 2: set weapon -1

current weapon available: change weapon.

let's say you have 5 weapons
if weapon = 0, set weapon 5
if weapon = 6, set weapon 1

[Jarred]

SoftWarewolf, do you have an example of how to insert the 'current weapon unavailalbe' in to the event? I keep getting a syntax error with the 'Loops - on each object'