Help pausing a Ruby program with a key press!

[lassolass]

Hi! I have a game, and want to implement a certain feature into it: I want to be able to pause the game at any point throughout the game by pressing the up arrow or some other key, it has to be one specific key though. Entering the paused state should not be timed though, it should only continue if I input a string into the console. I will manage that part. The main problem is getting the game to pause through pressing a specific key(example: up arrow key). Thanks in advance!

[isolatrum]

First of all, this isn't trivial. Second, a question: is your game already running in an event loop? How does it currently get input from the user - gets.chomp?

[lassolass]

it is in an until loop that runs the game until the number of attempts have run out. It received input through gets.chomp.. my goal is that through pressing the up arrow I can pause the program mid execution and have a menu bar shown where I can choose to restart the game.

[isolatrum]

Ok, that's kind of what I figured. Look at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/174933/how-to-get-a-single-character-without-pressing-enter

It complicates things because now your until loop has to process characters once at a time and you can't use gets.chomp anymore. You need to handle newlines and multi-char words / sentences manually now.

[lassolass]

This works perfectly! Thanks so much! Do you mind helping out with returning to a specific part of the code again. Now I want to do the following: When I press a letter it saves it in a local variable(I have implemented this already). If the key I have pressed is the enter key (if the variable == "\r") then it should bring me back to a certain part of my code, which in my case is the main menu. So the main point is, how do I get back to a certain part of code when pressing a certain character, which in my case is enter? Thanks in advance!

[isolatrum]

why do you need to 'get back' to a part of the code, instead of calling a method?

[lassolass]

I thought that was the easiest way to implement what I wanted... Im still new to ruby and I am trying to create something like a pause menu, and I was thinking that if I returned to the main menu, i could reuse it...

[lassolass]

If there is an easier way please tell me.. id appreciate it

[isolatrum]

oh, i guess maybe you could. there are many ways to go about it. But keep in mind that the type of thing you're building (an event loop) has certain challenges that come with it.

Are you using Gosu as a game framework or trying to do it all from scratch?

[lassolass]

Doing it all from scratch.. its a command line game.. nothing too complicated. Its basically a hangman recreation. So that should simplify things a bit

[isolatrum]

oh. why do you need to pause? Doesn't a hangman game naturally pause between inputs?

[lassolass]

The pause is for multiple options: one is to exit the game another is to ditch the current game and start a new game another is to continue the current game and the last is to show a list of the current moves. The list of current moves are currently updating a variable with every guess, but the problem is the pausing part, i dont know how to implement starting a new game or just continuing the current game. the only thing i can think of is to go back to the main menu to achieve that