Opening Screen

[AndyWanKenobi]

Now you can click, press enter or return, or wait 30 seconds to get through the opening screen (Hooptie's story).
I found that 20 seconds wasn't quite long enough for me to be able to read the whole thing, and it's not like that number matters much for people not reading it.

[flipflop]

Personally, I don't like the Hooptie story being displayed every time I want to play a game. Does it make sense to put the Hooptie story in another view accessable from a menu item like "About Hooptie..."? Sure you can click through the story if you don't want to read it but that's an extra click needed before the game starts.

Something else, should there be a button to click in the window to start a new game, customize the keys and read in a new file bundle?

Look forward to the "click through"!
- John :)

[Pazolli]

I agree somewhat with John about not necessarily wanting the story screen to display everytime. To remedy the situation I suggest we insert a "Don't show story screen" checkbox option in the preferences. To do so would involve playing around with the MainMenu.nib, NSUserDefaults and the GamePrefs manager but shouldn't be that difficult to implement. Is AndyOne or anyone else up to completing this task?

Also thanks for all your work AndyOne, it's much appreciated.

Mark.

P.S. If someone does opt to complete this task use a GamePrefs method to determine whether to skip the kOpeningScreen or not, not a global Boolean.

[AndyWanKenobi]

Sure, I'd be happy to try. I'm not exactly sure how all the NSUserDefaults stuff works but with this forum and my handy Cocoa reference, I ought to be able to bash my way through it. (Hopefully)

I'm happy to help, in fact I'm thrilled to be able to have a Cocoa project to work on.

[AndyWanKenobi]

Well, that wasn't nearly as hard as I had thought. Those User defaults are really easy to work with, and skipping the story was just adding an if in the gameController. Though I did have to add a new outlet for the gamePrefs, since there didn't seem to be one before. No biggie though.

[Pazolli]

Thank you AndyOne for all your contributions to the project so far. They were very well implemented except for one minor thing (which I've since fixed). In the "init" method of the GamePrefs class you called:


showStoryEveryTime = [defaults boolForKey:@"showStoryEveryTime"];
if( showStoryEveryTime == nil ) {
// Set showStoryEveryTime to the default value
}


This was understandable since it was how default values were established for others, but since "showStoryEveryTime" was 0 when the showStoryEveryTime boolean was false, the showStoryEveryTime boolean was set to the default value (true) everytime the game started up. Instead you should have done something like:


showStoryEveryTime = [defaults boolForKey:@"showStoryEveryTime"];
if( [defaults objectForKey:@"showStoryEveryTime"] == nil ) {
// Set showStoryEveryTime to the default value
}


Also, in future, you can probably assume a direct translation between booleans and states. Don't worry if you didn't pick up everything in the above as it wasn't that important. The important thing was the tasks were completed very well.

Thank you ever so much for your help.

Will think of some more tasks soon,
Mark Pazolli