Hi there,

I'm making a game in TA mode that's reminiscent of a gamebook (I just needed the power behind TA), and it occurred to me that rather than using a lot of semi-horrific workarounds to get the results I want, I could just list the possible choices in any room as a menu. But those numbers before each option (1) ... , 2) .... etc) break the immersion. Is there an easy way to get rid of this? All I want to see when the menu is displayed is the hyperlinked actual text for each option.

Thanks!

The easiest way to do that would be to copy and paste the following into your game, in Code View mode, just above the closing </asl> tag at the end of the file. Be sure to back up your game first! If something goes wrong, it's easier to copy from a backup than to try to undo edits. Here is the code:

  <function name="ShowMenu" parameters="caption, options, allowCancel, callback">
    <![CDATA[
    outputsection = StartNewOutputSection()
    msg (caption)
    
    count = 0
    game.menuoptionskeys = NewStringList()
    foreach (option, options) {
      list add (game.menuoptionskeys, option)
      count = count + 1
      if (TypeOf(options) = "stringlist") {
        optionText = option
      }
      else {
        optionText = StringDictionaryItem(options, option)
      }
      msg ("<a class=\"cmdlink\" style=\"" + GetCurrentLinkTextFormat() + "\" onclick=\"ASLEvent('ShowMenuResponse','" + option + "')\">" + optionText + "</a>")
    }
    EndOutputSection(outputsection)
    
    game.menuoptions = options
    game.menuallowcancel = allowCancel
    game.menucallback = callback
    game.menuoutputsection = outputsection
    ]]>
  </function>

This is a drop-in replacement for the core "ShowMenu" function, which has been modified to not print the numbers.

A completely different route is to not use menus but rather just print out {cmd:xxx:yyy} text elements, which will give you the links to click on. The downside to that is needing to create a command for each option, but since commands can be per-room, you can at least group the commands with the rooms. I'm not pushing one over the other - just listing options.

Thank you! This is what I was hoping for, a replacement to the default menu code - not quite technically up to scratch enough to figure it out.
As for commands I thought about it, but menu seems like the best way to disable the other options. I know how to get a command hyperlink to disable after clicking, but wasn't sure how to disable all the commands in a choice after picking one.
Thanks again!

As a side-note, maybe a possible future feature for Quest would be to have an in-built way of (in TA mode) having some hyperlinked text that simply then runs a script, so you could make far more complex gamebook-style ideas much easier.