User Interface Programming - Game Coding Complete - page 297

You might be asking yourself two things at this point. First, this seems an awful lot of
trouble to implement a modal dialog box that can be called with one line of code.
Second, how would I do this on non-Windows platforms? There is another way

—
easier in some ways to implement, but a little more hassle to call and ask the player
a simple yes or no question. The answer is to do this asynchronously.
First, you set up a dialog box as a screen just like we did above. You instantiate it and
launch it and set up a flag in your application to basically pause the game while this
screen is active. When the player presses the button and registers a response, it sends a
message to the subsystem that needed the player to answer a question. You ' ll see more
about how game messages can be created, sent, and interpreted in the next chapter.

Controls
Controls have lots of permutations, but most of them share similar properties. I

ve
seen push buttons, radio buttons, check boxes, combo boxes, edit boxes, expandable
menus, and all sorts of stuff. I

'

m sad to say.
Luckily, the DirectX Framework has already implemented most of the standard GUI
controls for you:

' ve also coded quite a few of them, I '

n CDXUTButton : A simple push button, like “ OK ” or “ Cancel ”
n CDXUTStatic : A static text control for putting non-active text on a dialog
n CDXUTCheckBox : A check box control for selecting on/off status for different items
n CDXUTRadioButton : A radio button control for selecting one thing out of
many choices
n CDXUTComboBox : A combo box uses one line but can drop down a list box of
choices
n CDXUTSlider : A simple slider to do things like volume controls
n CDXUTEditBox : A text edit box for doing things like entering your name or a
console command
n CDXUTIMEEditBox : A foreign language edit box
n CDXUTListBox : A list of choices displayed with a scroll bar
n CDXUTScrollBar : A vertical or horizontal scroll bar

You can attach any of these controls to a CDXUTDialog object to create your own
user interface, and as you saw in the CMessageBox example in the previous section,
these interfaces can be modal or modeless.