Before we ever get to coding any actual rooms, we need to set up a couple of variables that we are going to need. Since we are going to need them between rooms and throughout the whole game, we will need to make them global variables, we do this by placing them in the main script. If you skipped it, you may want to check out Chapter 1, Preparing the Main Script , as we reuse a number of the variables we added when we started the point and click inventory room.

Open up the main script and just below the inventory variables we added, let's add these.

    menuOption = 0          // determines menu shown on pointnclick bar

    sGauge                  // game speed guage name
    vGauge                  // volume guage name
    pncSpeed                // speed set with guage
    pncVolume               // volume set with guage

    gGameTitle              // a pointer to our games title

For the most part, we luck out because our regular game rooms are going to be using the same variables we added already for the point and click inventory. So if you haven't gone through the inventory room portion of this tutorial, you probably should. Most of these new variables, if you notice by their names basicly have one job, and that is to deal with the guages, speed and volume. menuOption, determines which set of menu buttons to show. Finally gGameTitle, which isn't essential for a point and click system, but I do reference it in our text resources so you may want to add it too.

Now if you included the gGameTitle variable, we are actually going to need a couple of more edits in the main script, just to make our life easier. First off though we are going to need to actually give it a value. So scroll down to just below the variable declarations to the main script's init method and at the gVersion declaration, go ahead and give your game a title.

        =  gGameTitle "The PnC Template" 
        = gVersion "1.0"

Since we've got it declared now, we may as well make use of the gGameTitle variable, so go ahead and scroll down some more, just a little more than half way, you should find the statusCode instance. Go ahead and change that to this.

(instance statusCode  of Code
	(properties)
 	(method (doit param1)
  		Format(param1 " Score: %d of %-3d                      %s " gScore gMaxScore gGameTitle)
 	)
)

This is supposed to be a point and click game, so we may as well take away the users ability to type in commands as well. This can be done quite simply here in the main script. Simply scroll down to public procedure for PlayerControl and change the canInput value from TRUE to FALSE, so now it should look something like this.

(procedure public (PlayerControl)
	(User:
		canControl(TRUE)
		canInput(FALSE)
	)
	(send gEgo:setMotion(NULL))
)

We do have one more edit yet to make in the main script though. If you are using the template game that comes with sci companion, we are going to be adding another case or two to the debug area that Troflip set up. If you are using the template game that comes with sci studio, which I certainly hope you aren't, might I suggest that you check out the how to titled Troflip's easy alt debugging, that is the same code which we are about to add to.

So find the code

  (if (== evKEYBOARD (send pEvent:type))
     (switch (send pEvent:message)
     // Check for ALT keys
	(case $2f00 // alt-v
	      Show(1) // Show visual
	) 

And we want to add in there, the Tab button, or $09

  (if (== evKEYBOARD (send pEvent:type))
     (switch (send pEvent:message)
	(case $09 // tab
           (if(== canTab TRUE)
           = gPreviousCursor gCurrentCursor
           (send gRoom:newRoom(500))
           )
        )
	// Check for ALT keys
	(case $2f00 // alt-v
	      Show(1) // Show visual
	)

We had to add in that bit to check if the user pressed the Tab button on their keyboard, because the edit I am going to have you make in the Controls script causes the Tab button to no longer function. This is an easy workaround for that.

Keep in mind though, if you comment out the debug functions prior to releasing your game publicly, you will still need to keep our edit intact, so just comment the debug cases, not the whole thing.