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Non-pausing Popup Menus

A topic by Derik Digital created 30 days ago Views: 42 Replies: 3
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The documentation says "It might be possible to implement non-pausing popup menus in the future, but the menu bar / system menu would still pause the game.", and I'm wondering if this is something you've gotten a method for since this was released, or if you have plans to add that feature anytime soon? It would be useful for a few of my projects to have such functionality.

Developer

I gave it a few pokes at some point but turns out that menus on Windows are tied to threads so you can’t just cheat this by calling the menu functions on a separate thread and grabbing the results when done - you have to update/render the game on a separate thread, which isn’t currently possible in GameMaker unless you have an Enterprise subscription for source code access and a lot of time on your hands. There might be undocumented tricks that I’m not aware of, it’s hard to tell with WinAPI.

If you just bought the extension and for this specifically, you could request a refund and buy Windows’ windows instead - a custom window is how all major web browsers do context menus these days (you can see it with AutoHotKey’s Window Spy).

I appreciate the response, thankyou! Your suggestion about a custom window is smart, and I might check it out. Just to make sure I understand, the idea is that rather than using a windows popup menu with this extension, I'd just make up my own menu and render that to a secondary window? 

Developer

Yup - by drawing the menu in its own little window it can extend outside the game window like a “real” menu would, but will not be subject to limitations of “real” menus.