Creating a Script Menu

In this tutorial, we'll build out an example menu with various submenus and functions.

Creating a New Script

Using what we learned from TriggerFunction.lua let's make a new script that spawns a marker on the player, and can be triggered from the script menu.

tip

The mumble coordinates have the Y and Z axis swapped, so be careful if you use it to set the position of a marker!

/Data/ExamplePack/Scripts/SpawnMarker.lua

ExamplePack.SpawnMarker = {
    -- Instead of a table, we'll just keep track of one spawned marker
    spawnedMarker = nil,
    category = World:CategoryByType("ep.marker.category")
}

Debug:Watch("SpawnMarker", ExamplePack.SpawnMarker)

-- Don't need to pass any params anymore
local function spawnNewMarker()
    -- We'll use the Mumble global to get the players position
    local playerPos = Mumble.PlayerCharacter.Position
    local new_marker_attr = {   
        MapVisibility = false,
        InGameVisibility = true,
        Category = ExamplePack.SpawnMarker.category,
        -- Note the swapped Z and Y!
        xpos = playerPos.X,
        ypos = playerPos.Z,
        zpos = playerPos.Y,
        iconFile = "Data/ExamplePack/Markers/MarkerIcon.png",
    }
    -- We can just directly store the marker now
    ExamplePack.SpawnMarker.spawnedMarker = Pack:CreateMarker(new_marker_attr)
end

-- Don't need to pass any params anymore, we'll just directly remove the marker
local function removeNewMarker()
    if ExamplePack.SpawnMarker.spawnedMarker ~= nil then
        ExamplePack.SpawnMarker.spawnedMarker:Remove()
        ExamplePack.SpawnMarker.spawnedMarker = nil
    end
end


-- No params needed anymore
function EP_SpawnMarker()
    -- Now we can just perform the check here and offload the logic to the new functions
    if ExamplePack.SpawnMarker.spawnedMarker ~= nil then
        removeNewMarker()
    else
        spawnNewMarker()
    end

end

Nice work! Now we have a global function that should be able to spawn a marker on the player's position, and remove it if it already exists.

Creating the Menu

The most important concept to understand when creating menus is that you're essentially just nesting them within each other.

The global Menu object is the root of all menus, and you add onto it by calling Menu:Add. This function returns a new Menu object, which you can then add submenus or functions to, and so on.

Let's create a root menu for our pack, and then add a few submenu's to it.

/Data/ExamplePack/Scripts/menu.lua

-- To do something when a menu is clicked, we need to have OnClick functions...let's make a few
-- This is a simple function that logs a message to the debug console, 
-- Note that it takes a menu as a parameter, a requirement for OnClick functions
local function logPrint(menu)
    Debug:Print("This is a log message from the menu!")
end

-- This function will log whether the checkbox is checked or not
local function checkStatus(menu)
    Debug:Print("Checkbox is currently: " .. tostring(menu.Checked))
end

-- This function will trigger our global SpawnMarker function
local function spawnMarker(menu)
    EP_SpawnMarker()
end

-- Now let's build our menu
-- This is our root menu
local rootMenu = Menu:Add("Example Menu", nil)

-- Here we add a menu item to the root menu, and assign the logPrint function to it
local subMenu1 = rootMenu:Add("Log to Console", logPrint, false, false, "Logs a message to the debug console")

-- Here we add a submenu to the root menu
local subMenu2WithChildren = rootMenu:Add("Cool Script Functions", nil, false, false, "Contains some cool script functions")
-- Here we add a few menu items to the submenu to trigger our other functions
local childMenu1 = subMenu2WithChildren:Add("Checkbox Function", checkStatus, true, false, "This function logs whether it is checked or not")
local childMenu2 = subMenu2WithChildren:Add("Spawn Marker", spawnMarker, false, false, "This function will spawn a marker on the player, or remove it if it already was spawned")

With this we have the basis of a simple menu. Now all we need to do is add the scripts to our pack.lua, and we should be able to see the menu in game!

Adding the Menu to the pack.lua

pack.lua

ExamplePack = {}

Pack:Require("Data/ExamplePack/Scripts/SpawnMarker.lua")
-- Note, the menu must be loaded after any of the global functions it references. This is the same for any other script that references global functions.
Pack:Require("Data/ExamplePack/Scripts/menu.lua")

Now when you load into the game, you should see a "Scripts" menu in the Pathing icon menu, and you can navigate through it to test out the submenus and functions we've added!

Congrats on creating your first script menu! 🎉