"Pausing" a script until the player provides a text input

[graysond]

Hello!

I have created a custom gui with a text box, and I know how to use the "OnActivate" event. But here's a use case I can't figure out:

I would like a character to say some dialogue, then the player to provide a text input while the script waits for this input, then the character to respond to that input.

The problem I run into is that if I call the gui with the text box, the script continues to run. I would like the game to wait until an OnActivate event is called.

As an example:

Code: ags

{
cRoger.Say("What would you like for breakfast?");
// A custom gui pops up with a text box. The script does not continue until the player enters text and that text is stored as string via OnActivate.
cRoger.Say("[TOAST], eh? I can do that.");
}

Another scenario might be: A character asks the player "What's your name?", the player is prompted to give a name, then the conversation continues.

The default Game.InputBox seems to work like this normally, as if it's calling a special wait function, but I don't know how to achieve the same behavior with a custom gui.

I have found some workarounds for my specific use case but they are inefficient. But that said, because I have something that works I am mostly interested in the "best" way to do this rather than other workarounds.

Thanks in advance!

[Crimson Wizard]

In AGS you cannot pause a script in the middle to receive GUI input or user input. Meaning you can wait in the middle using Wait command or a blocking action, but during that GUIs won't react to input, and events like "on_key_press" and "on_mouse_click" won't run.

The common way is to break the script into 2 parts, one run before the input and another after.

How to do that depends on whether this is a regular script or a dialog script.
For instance, if done in dialog script, you could implement 2 parts as 2 separate topics, and have dialog options with text input box shown in the middle (there's a setting in Dialog that allows to show input box in dialog options).

With regular script, you will have to finish the first part with displaying a GUI with text box (possibly the GUI with "Pause game when shown" style), and run the second part when that particular text box receives OnActivate event.

[Rik_Vargard]

I don't know if this is useful but I had that moment when the player had to put a phrase as a password.
So I just had a GUI with a textbox for the player to fill in.

And My code was

Code: ags

if (tbPassword.Text == "Blablabla")
  {
   And here comes the aftermath
  }

[graysond]

Thanks for the replies!

If I'm understanding everything, it seems like there's no way to get a player-inputted string in the middle of a script besides tossing things to a separate script. Unfortunate!

[eri0o]

If you ignore different keyboard layouts, ignore anything beyond English, and can do some scripting, you can hack your Game.InputBox like by using the wait functions with their skip reason

https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/Globalfunctions_Wait.html

You can still use the mouse input as skip reason combined with their positions if you also want to accept hits in a keyboard image (say for minimal touch support). Also forget the textbox, use a label and then assemble the text and use the label to present the text.

Anyway, not pretty but can be done without too many lines.