pausing a game

[bluekronos]

Hi,
I have a tower defense game with enemies and towers that are nested inside movie clips upon movie clips, each with their own onEnterFrame and running their own code

It's pretty much done, but... being a tower defense game that could take forever to play, it REALLY needs a pause button
is there any easy way to just freeze everything without having to create a pause boolean inside all onEnterFrames and onMouseMoves, pausing all sounds, and then commanding all looping movie clips to pause, etc?

[Never_land:(]

I use

if(!root.paused){
//actions
} 

Mc loops
instead of playing mcs I only nextFrame() them till they reach certain frame gotoAndStop() them to loop

[smith1302]

Nope there is no easy way. You just have to use the good old !pause and pause thing like never land said.

[mr_malee]

huh? no easy way

onEnterFrame = null;

looks pretty easy to me

as for pausing movie clips, that is what gets complicated, you have to use recursion and even then you must have a way to determine whether a paused movie clip was playing before you paused it, so it can resume animation. The easiest way I've found to do that is use 2 iterations for pausing:

user requests pause
create pause object
run recursion through all movieclips on stage, through their children until no more clips are found.
add these clips into pauseObject, record currentFrame property of all movieclips

second iteration
run through all objects in pauseObject, check pauseObject currentframe, if its different than the movieclips new frame, it must play again, so flag this.
stop all movieclips
null the enterFrame

user resumes
loop thorugh all objects in pauseObject
if object needs play resume, do so
clear pauseObject
bring back enterFrame

as for sounds, I would just stop all of them, no need to pause all sounds. Can't remeber the syntax in AS2, but something like: Sound.stopAll()

[renderhjs]

each with their own onEnterFrame and running their own code

,
you´ll get a way better performance if you put all the code on the main timeline and run through a loop inside a onEnterFrame event instead of having multiple onEnterFrames.

e.g

function init(){
    towers = new Array();
    towers = [{x:15,y:64,type:1},{x:64,y:18,type:2},{x:2,y:8,type:2}];
    
    for (var i=0;i<towers.length;i++){
        mc_world.attachMovie("tower","t"+i,i);
        mc_world["t"+i].gotoAndStop(towers[i].type);
    }
}
init();

var pause = false;
_root.onEnterFrame = function(){
    if (!pause){
        
        for (var i=0;i<towers.length;i++){
            var mc = mc_world["t"+i];
            if (towers[i].type == 1){
                //do code with mc tower type 1
            }else if(towers[i].type == 2){
                //do code with mc tower type 2
            }
        }
    }
} 

plus your code structure will be much easier to change/ fix or extend because you dont need to change the code on multiuple movieClips. Hell putting code on MovieClips is flash5 style

[Never_land:(]

now that we are talking about how to stop games, again

can we talk about something I would like to implement to the stop

I am asking if there is a way to have a print of every thing thats in screen,
to stop only enterframes not animations, because honestly it's a pain in the a$$ unpause everything.

[mr_malee]

bitmapData, create a bitmapData the size of the stage, then draw() your world, _root or any clip where all game elements are stored into this bitmap.

var bmp = new BitmapData(Stage.width, Stage.height, true, 0)
var mc = createEmptyMovieClip("pauseClip", depth)

mc.attachBitmap(bmp)

bmp.draw(myWorld)

but it might look weird when switching back to game if animations are still playing

[renderhjs]

now that we are talking about how to stop games, again

can we talk about something I would like to implement to the stop

I am asking if there is a way to have a print of every thing thats in screen,
to stop only enterframes not animations, because honestly it's a pain in the a$$ unpause everything.

for (var a in _root){
        if(typeof(eval(a)) == "movieclip"){
            delete eval(a).onEnterFrame;//will delete a mc.onEnterframe = function(){}; method
        }
    } 

sadly mc.onEnterFrame =function(){}; and onClipEvent(enterFrame){}; are completely different things and this works only with the first one. As far as I know you can´t delete the later one aka the flash 5 style one.
some other thread regarding that:
http://www.actionscript.org/forums/s...threadid=24905

Better get rid of that style anyway

[Never_land:(]

render
I got rid of that style ages ago I manage
mc.onEnterFrame =function(){} with less enterframes as possible

malee thnx for your code but it's not working

Edit: trace (bmp) // undefined

[mr_malee]

you have to import the bitmapData package:

import flash.display.BitmapData

before you use it

[Squize]

Using draw(); like Mr.M suggested works a treat.

A nice way to hide it ( When going back to the game from the pause mode ) is to cover the screen in some eye-candy when paused, so not just pause text but put a ghosted out box over the top, or put a blur on the paused bitmap, and then you can wipe back to the game and hide what you did.

Nice.

Squize.

[Never_land:(]

Edit: yeah I see it in many console games.
great idea mr malee can you send me a fla with your code, It's not working

[mr_malee]

CS3 format

[Never_land:(]

I use flash8

[mr_malee]

heer you go

[Never_land:(]

woooooohoooo thanks mr malee.
owe you one

[sasuke82]

i found a component called pause component. it can pause/resume every nested onEnterFrames, movieclips, buttons, mouse & key listener.
find it at
http://www.flashcomponents.net/autho...binkhalid.html

this component cost USD15. but it still do wonder for my game.

[ImprisonedPride]

I don't understand malee, why two iterations? Why not just give the movieclips an isPlaying boolean member, and set it to true or false when starting/stopping it? Then you'd only need one iteration and just check if (mc.isPlayer) {}; or is there something I'm missing?

[renderhjs]

http://www.flashcomponents.net/autho...binkhalid.html
this component cost USD15. but it still do wonder for my game.

that is soooo sad- because basicly all you need are 2-3 lines of code.