How to setup tradtional Menu/Game Scenes

[meanbeanmachine]

I'm confused about how to make the traditional Menu/Game Scene setup. With other tools, like Godot, I can make a Menu Scene with its own UI. Then I could have a button like "New Game" which sends a message to the root controller, which will unload the Menu Scene and load the Game Scene (which also has its own UI).

The Fyrox "Plugin" feels like it should be the root controller, but that means the Menu/Game Scenes will need to be a "ScriptTrait", which is a problem because there is no "on_ui_message" method on ScriptTrait. The Fyrox tutorials all have you building your UI elements on the Plugin struct. So that means the Menu and Game "Scenes" actually need to be a Plugin, that way they can have their own UI and methods. The problem I have though, is how would you now handle loading/unloading these plugins? It seems like this was not the intended design. If so, that's a problem, because ScriptTraits can't have their own UI elements, which would not make any sense for a true Scene.

[mrDIMAS]

You're right that plugin is a sort of root controller, but in Fyrox it is more like a container for global application state. Every plugin has access to the default UI instance (context.user_interface field in its methods) which you can use for your menus. So in your case you can either create a menu by code or in the editor (only in nightly version of the engine, see below) and then handle messages from the UI in Plugin::on_ui_message method implementation. For example, when you starting a new game, you can request a new game scene to be loaded and hide the UI by sending WidgetMessage::visibility(your_widget_handle, MessageDirection::ToWidget, false) to your root menu widget. When you pause the game, you send WidgetMessage::visibility(your_widget_handle, MessageDirection::ToWidget, true) to the same widget. Alternatively, you can even destroy the entire UI and re-create it on demand.

Also, the latest (nightly from GitHub) Fyrox contains UI scenes, that can be edited in the editor. These are essentially a container for a bunch of widgets, that can be saved/loaded, but they're also a completely different entity and does not overlap with standard game scenes and widgets cannot have scripts on them. I planned a tutorial about the UI and I'll start writing it as soon as I'll finish rewriting the FPS tutorial (probably a day more needed).

Hope this helps.