Rooms

rooms is an optional package bundled with Tide, in the namespace Rooms. It provides a ready-made menu over the engine's sessions and room codes. The engine can host and join matches without this package; Rooms supplies the pages and buttons players use to do it.

Using Rooms

A game needs all of the above before two people can play it, and a menu to reach them from. The rooms package is that menu, so a game has one from its first day and writes its own when it's ready. List it in the game's tide.packages:

rooms

The game then opens on a title page, with its name over Play, Host a room and Join a room; a page to type a friend's code into, which Enter joins from; and the room's page, with the code to copy, who's in it, Resume and Leave the room. In the match, Menu in the bottom left corner, or Escape, brings the room's page back. It's drawn over a live match: Main stays the match's, so the game runs behind the title, and Play closes the menu. A game started with --host or --join, or a page opened with ?host or ?join=, has no menu in its way. A match that ends, or a room that can't be joined, puts the machine back on the title with a line that says why.

Settings on the title or room's page opens a Volume slider, from mute to full volume, for this machine's audio. Changes apply at once; Back or Escape returns to the page that opened it. The local Lobby.volume goes from 0 to 1 and starts at 1. It stays through starting, joining and leaving matches while the game is open, and resets to full volume when the game restarts. The settings page has Lobby.page == Page.Settings, so the same HUD and input checks below cover it.

The pages are the GUI's own widgets, in whatever theme the game sets, and the devices are theirs while a page is up. What the game reads of it is one local singleton, Lobby, through using Rooms;:

using Rooms;

input Controls
{
    bool jump;

    Sample(Devices devices, Lobby lobby)
    {
        // Nothing is sent while a page is up, or until the press that closed it is let go
        jump = lobby.playing && devices.keyboard.space.down;
    }
}

view Hud(Lobby lobby)
{
    if (lobby.page != Page.Playing) return;
    ...
}

A game can tell the room's page about its match, each frame, from a view that writes Lobby: seats, manned (a bit per seat a player has), mine and bots list who has each seat, and offersNewGame and offersBots put New game and Bots: on/off on the page, which set newGame and toggleBots for the frame they're pressed in, for the game to send its commands from. Play on the title sets newGame too. The title is the game's title setting (Application.title), and three functions are the game's to override: Rooms.Title(), Rooms.Tagline() (the line under it) and Rooms.MenuButton(screen) (where the button goes).

Pages of your own

Each page is a function too, which a game overrides to draw that page its own way while the others stay the package's: Rooms.TitlePage(session, lobby), Rooms.JoinPage(session, lobby), Rooms.RoomPage(session, room, lobby) (room is the room's code, session.room, which a function is handed) and Rooms.SettingsPage(lobby). What a page's buttons do is a call each, so a page of the game's keeps the menu's way through its pages:

using Rooms;

override void Rooms.TitlePage(Session session, mut Lobby lobby)
{
    if (GUI.Button(Rect(40, 200, 200, 48), "Play")) Play(lobby);
    if (GUI.Button(Rect(40, 256, 200, 48), "Play with friends")) Host(lobby);
    if (GUI.Button(Rect(40, 312, 200, 48), "Enter a code")) ShowJoin(lobby);
    if (GUI.Button(Rect(40, 368, 200, 48), "Settings")) ShowSettings(lobby);
}

An override has the parameters of what it replaces, so a page that needs more (the game's own state, or Devices) is a view of the game's: override the package's page with an empty body, and draw yours from a view that returns unless lobby.page is that page. The same calls work there.

Outgrowing it

tide eject rooms copies the package into the game, as packages/rooms, and points the game's tide.packages line at the copy: it's the game's own from there, to change as you like, and tide upgrade no longer updates it. It's a page of Tide, written with nothing a game can't use.

A game whose players gather before a match, see who's ready, browse what's open or press one button to find a match lists the lobby package instead: see Lobbies and matchmaking.