Setting _game_menu_screen dynamically

[plaster]

My game menu has four screens, which we'll call foo, bar, and baz. By default, _game_menu_screen is set to "foo", so hitting the menu key, X, or right-clicking will open foo.

If a player goes to any one of the other screens and then closes the menu from there, I would like to be change _game_menu_screen to the last screen they accessed. For example, if someone goes to bar, and then closes out of the in-game menu, the next time they press X, I would like to open bar instead of foo.

Doing this:

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screen foo():
    on "show" action SetVariable("_game_menu_screen", "foo")
    text "[_game_menu_screen]"

shows "foo" on the screen. But if config._game_menu_screen was set to "bar," _invoke_game_menu will open bar. If I set _game_menu_screen to "baz" within the actual game, the game menu will become baz, but foo will still show "foo" !

The difficulty is that the in-game menu is a different context than the game itself, right? I don't really understand contexts, call stacks, or store variables. I am hack-and-slashing my way through OOP tbh. pls help tho I'm out of ideas :[

[PyTom]

So, _game_menu_screen is, for a bunch of reasons, treated specially. Ren'Py makes it a dynamic variable when entering the the menus, and hence resets it to its own value when leaving.

To avoid it, avoid using _game_menu_screen entirely. Instead, intercept it at config.game_menu_action. My version is this, with a little bit of setup.

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default game_menu_screen = "save"

init python:

    class InvokeGameMenu(Action):

        def __call__(self):
            return renpy.run(ShowMenu(game_menu_screen))

    config.game_menu_action = InvokeGameMenu()

And then code like this in every screen.

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    on "show" action SetVariable("game_menu_screen", "save")
    on "replace" action SetVariable("game_menu_screen", "save")

You probably want to run on replace as well as show, so you get it triggered when changing screens. There's nothing special about the name game_menu_show, it just happens to be similar to _game_menu_show.