Why isn't my localscript working? - user-interface

I am basically trying to script a GUI control panel that allows users to accelerate the train with a power lever (in the GUI) and a reverser (Forward, Neutral, Reverse)
I have made two scripts. One is a localscript, the other being a regular script. The regular script enables the GUI on a player's screen when the player sits in the seat. The localscript is what makes the GUI function.
I've scripted the entire thing but only the regular script seems to function, The localscript does not seem to function as it is scripted to. The GUI appears on the screen but when pressed it does nothing.
Here are the contents of the localscript
http://pastebin.com/raw/XnT2Bi2X
Here's are all the objects in the Workspace that is mentioned and relevant to the script:
https://s31.postimg.org/4hd2up2ij/Screen_Shot_2016_06_24_at_11_15_21_AM.png
What are the errors in the localscript that is not allowing the GUI to function as its scripted to?
(I apologize for the long script and thank you for your help in advanced)
Note: The codes are Lua (which are used on the ROBLOX Studio Platform)

First off, thanks for writing out a clear and concise question. Most of the questions under this tag are all over the place :).
I would verify that you LocalScript instance is being properly initialized inside of the Player instance that is sitting down. Looking over your LocalScript's code, I don't see any errors that would cause the GUI not to function (if the LocalScript is being initialized properly), which leads me to believe the LocalScript isn't even running. If you are loading the LocalScript into the player on spawn (so, putting it into the PlayerScripts folder), there's your problem. This would cause the GUI to not be set up properly, as it hasn't been inserted into the players PlayerGui instance yet, so the LocalScript won't be able to hook up the MouseButton1Click events or anything of that sort.
So, make sure that the LocalScript starts running once the player sits in the seat (use the regular Script that displays the GUI to also move a copy of the LocalScript into the player). This will (hopefully) initialize the LocalScript properly, and allow it to hook into the GUI.
If this doesn't work, check your output window for any blatant errors, and post em here.
Cheers!
-widoreu

Related

Implementing a Custom Cocoa Event Tracking Loop

I'm working on a custom cross platform UI library that needs a synchronous "ShowPopup" method that shows a popup, runs an event loop until it's finished and automatically cancels when clicking outside the popup or pressing escape. Keyboard, mouse and scroll wheel events need to be dispatched to the popup but other events (paint, draw, timers etc...) need to be dispatched to their regular targets while the loop runs.
Edit: for clarification, by popup, I mean this kind of menu style popup window, not an alert/dialog etc...
On Windows I've implemented this fairly simply by calling GetMessage/DispatchMessage and filtering and dispatching messages as appropriate. Works fine.
I've much less experience with Cocoa/OS X however and finding the whole event loop/dispatch paradigm a bit confusing. I've seen the following article which explains how to implement a mouse tracking loop which is very similar to what I need:
http://stpeterandpaul.ca/tiger/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/EventOverview/HandlingMouseEvents/chapter_5_section_4.html
but... there's some things about this that concern me.
The linked article states: "the application’s main thread is unable to process any other requests during an event-tracking loop and timers might not fire". Might not? Why not, when not, how to make sure they do?
The docs for nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue: states "events that do not match one of the specified event types are left in the queue.". That seems a little odd. Does this mean that if an event loop only asks for mouse events then any pressed keys will be processed once the loop finishes? That'd be weird.
Is it possible to peek at a message in the event queue without removing it. eg: the Windows version of my library uses this to close the popup when it's clicked outside, but leaves the click event in the queue so that clicking outside the popup on a another button doesn't require a second click.
I've read and re-read about run loop modes but still don't really get it. A good explanation of what these are for would be great.
Are there any other good examples of implementing an event loop for a popup. Even better would be pseudo-code for what the built in NSApplication run loop does.
Another way of putting all this... what's the Cocoa equivalent of Windows' PeekMessage(..., PM_REMOVE), PeekMessage(..., PM_NOREMOVE) and DispatchMessage().
Any help greatly appreciated.
What exactly is a "popup" as you're using the term? That term means different things in different GUI APIs. Is it just a modal dialog window?
Update for edits to question:
It seems you just want to implement a custom menu. Apple provides a sample project, CustomMenus, which illustrates that technique. It's a companion to one of the WWDC 2010 session videos, Session 145, "Key Event Handling in Cocoa Applications".
Depending on exactly what you need to achieve, you might want to use an NSAlert. Alternatively, you can use a custom window and just run it modally using the -runModalForWindow: method of NSApplication.
To meet your requirement of ending the modal session when the user clicks outside of the window, you could use a local event monitor. There's even an example of just such functionality in the (modern, current) Cocoa Event Handling Guide: Monitoring Events.
All of that said, here are (hopefully no longer relevant) answers to your specific questions:
The linked article states: "the application’s main thread is unable to process any other requests during an event-tracking loop and
timers might not fire". Might not? Why not, when not, how to make
sure they do?
Because timers are scheduled in a particular run loop mode or set of modes. See the answer to question 4, below. You would typically use the event-tracking mode when running an event-tracking loop, so timers which are not scheduled in that mode will not run.
You could use the default mode for your event-tracking loop, but it really isn't a good idea. It might cause unexpected re-entrancy.
Assuming your pop-up is similar to a modal window, you should probably use NSModalPanelRunLoopMode.
The docs for nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:
states "events that do not match one of the specified event types are
left in the queue.". That seems a little odd. Does this mean that if
an event loop only asks for mouse events then any pressed keys will be
processed once the loop finishes? That'd be weird.
Yes, that's what it means. It's up to you to prevent that weird outcome. If you were to read a version of the Cocoa Event Handling Guide from this decade, you'd find there's a section on how to deal with this. ;-P
Is it possible to peek at a message in the event queue without removing it. eg: the Windows version of my library uses this to close
the popup when it's clicked outside, but leaves the click event in the
queue so that clicking outside the popup on a another button doesn't
require a second click.
Yes. Did you notice the "dequeue:" parameter of nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:? If you pass NO for that, then the event is left in the queue.
I've read and re-read about run loop modes but still don't really get it. A good explanation of what these are for would be great.
It's hard to know what to tell you without knowing what you're confused about and how the Apple guide failed you.
Are you familiar with handling multiple asynchronous communication channels using a loop around select(), poll(), epoll(), or kevent()? It's kind of like that, but a bit more automated. Not only do you build a data structure which lists the input sources you want to monitor and what specific events on those input sources you're interested in, but each input source also has a callback associated with it. Running the run loop is like calling one of the above functions to wait for input but also, when input arrives, calling the callback associated with the source to handle that input. You can run a single turn of that loop, run it until a specific time, or even run it indefinitely.
With run loops, the input sources can be organized into sets. The sets are called "modes" and identified by name (i.e. a string). When you run a run loop, you specify which set of input sources it should monitor by specifying which mode it should run in. The other input sources are still known to the run loop, but just ignored temporarily.
The -nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue: method is, more or less, running the thread's run loop internally. In addition to whatever input sources were already present in the run loop, it temporarily adds an input source to monitor events from the windowing system, including mouse and key events.
Are there any other good examples of implementing an event loop for a popup. Even better would be pseudo-code for what the built in
NSApplication run loop does.
There's old Apple sample code, which is actually their implementation of GLUT. It provides a subclass of NSApplication and overrides the -run method. When you strip away some stuff that's only relevant for application start-up or GLUT, it's pretty simple. It's just a loop around -nextEventMatchingMask:... and -sendEvent:.

wxPython inactive state?

Right now I'm working on a program using wxPython, and I want to make a GUI in which under certain conditions, the widgets become inactive and the user can't interact with them. I'm pretty sure I have seen this in programs before, but I can't come up with a specific example. Is there a way to do this in wxPython? I have no idea what the technical name for this is, so even giving me that would be helpful.
When you say "the objects", what do you mean? If you mean a wx Frame, then you can call Frame.Freeze() to disable the frame, and Frame.Thaw() to unfreeze it. If you want to create a new dialog that must be interacted with and make all background windows unuseable, you can call Dialog.ShowModal(). Finally, many widgets have a Widget.Enable() function, to which you can pass True or False depending on if you want to enable it or not.

Using GUI causes "Sleep?" making Audio stutter/stop

Okay, as Title says.
For example, i use NAudio to playback what i record (loopback if you want).
And if i click on the GUI (the top part, so i can move the window).
It will cause a "sleep", and when that happens the current activity (Audio playback) stops.
And then it continues afterwards.
But i want to remove that, as i don´t know any other application that has it, so it´s probably something to do with how i am programming.
Please keep it simple, i am extremely new to c#.
I am guessing on Bakckgroundworker or something, but i couldn´t get it to work.
So hopping for a more concrete answer.
This was just me not understanding that using the Main Thread in a window form will cause anything on the GUI to be run on it.
Meaning, if i move the GUI, that movement will be Priority over the rest of the code, so everything else will get paused if run on that thread.
Perhaps it differ from object to object, but in this scenario it was the case, so i just moved it to a separate thread and it´s solved.

Can AppleScript read mouse position / action in one application and replicate it in another application?

I've been searching for a mouse broadcaster for Mac for a while and it seems there are no solutions for doing this, so I must look for alternative solutions now. I'm wondering if AppleScript is capable of performing such a task. Basically, what I would like to do is read mouse position and action when performed in one application for as long as the script is active, and broadcast/replicate it in one or more other applications. Is AppleScript capable of this?
Just to clarify, I'd need to simulate mouse movement in the other applications... for example, if I opened up several instances of a drawing program, assuming that the program had the same resolution, anything I drew in the main program, would replicate on the other programs.
Really applescript cannot do what you need. It's not made for that. Applescript is made to run the commands in an application's applescript dictionary. I assume that the dictionary of the applications you want to control give you no way to read and control the mouse.
You do have an applescript alternative though. I have made a command line tool to read the mouse position and also to move the mouse. So theoretically you can do what you want with applescript and my tool. I do not believe you will get the results you expect though. Anyway you can try. Here's a link to the web page for my tool. I hope it helps.
Get it here.
Your basic approach could be 1) activate the application you want to read the mouse position, 2) run my tool in a repeat loop and record the mouse positions, 3) activate the second application that you want to duplicate the mouse movements, 4) use a repeat loop with my tool to make the mouse move according to how you recorded it.

MATLAB: Prevent figures from being made active

I have a rather large routine which will can run for a couple of hours. Here and there it creates a figure, plots something to it and saves that Figure.
As I have only one PC, I would like to continue to work with that machine. The problem is that whenever a new figure is made, MATLAB becomes the active application again.
Is there any way to tell MATLAB or Windows that MATLAB should not be allowed to set itself to active?
I saw that one possibility is to run a MATLAB script totally in the background (like that). But that is a little bit too unsupervised, as I would like to be able to switch to the MATLAB window and check the output to the command window.
Any ideas? If there is a general solution for Windows that prevents that other Applications to become active would also be cool!
You can overload the figure function as following in order to prevent figure poping up:
a = figure('visible','off');
I hate to state the obvious, but you could always store the data you want to plot until the end.
Now, you're going to tell me that some of that data is subroutines and doesn't get passed back to the main routine. OK. So, the solution to that would be to write a "Store_Plot_Data" class with a method that would write into memory the data, the #plot_function_name (for 3D, scatter, etc.), the axis label strings, etc. Then you would create one instance of this class in your main routine and to ensure visibility of this one instance to all subroutines you could do any of the following:
use a global variable as your single instance ... OK, not so elegant,
implement the Singleton pattern, or
pass all subroutines the handle to that one instance of the "Store_Plot_Data" class.
If there is a general solution for Windows that prevents that other
Applications to become active would also be cool!
In Windows 7, this worked for me:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windowsxp/ht/stealingfocus02.htm
Set "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\ForegroundLockTimeout" to 30d40 (hex).
If you want all figures to not show.
set(0,'defaultFigureVisible','off');
In the beginning of your script do:
set(0, 'DefaultFigureVisible', 'off');
set(0, 'DefaultFigureWindowStyle', 'docked');
Dock the Matlab figure window and maximize any other application (Excel, Word etc.) you are working with in front of Matlab.
Then you can continue to work without being interrupted by figures blinking on your face.

Resources