Addcontext

Unless a game is currently in a pause, in most official Hugo interpreters, right-clicking on the screen will bring up whatever context menu has been defined for the game (possible in v3 or later games).

In Future Boy!, Kent Tessman coded an adaptive context menu system that updated itself depending on the player object, the location, and the objects and characters nearby (this system is available as a library contribution here). In Necrotic Drift, Robb Sherwin had a context menu that mirrored the options shown graphically to best approximate the menus used in Magnetic Scrolls games like Guild of Thieves and Jinxter. Conceivably, there are other novel uses yet to be discovered!

To do these context menus, one has to use the barely-mentioned-in-the-Hugo-Book command addcontext. Luckily, we are here to shed some light on its mysteriousness.

calling form	what it does
addcontext 0	Clears all context menu choices
addcontext “COMMAND”	Sends “COMMAND” to the command line with carriage return
addcontext “COMMAND…”	Sends “COMMAND “ text to the command and waits for more input
addcontext “-“	Puts a separator in the context menu between commands and the next command to be added

align=”top”|ways to call addcontext

Let’s show some examples:

addcontext "Look"   ! When this option is clicked in the context menu,
                    ! the command "Look" is executed
addcontext "Examine..."  ! When this is clicked, "Examine " is sent
                         ! to the command line and waits for more text to be typed

! addcontext is always used with a dictionary entry so you can't feed it a routine
! here is an example that WOULD NOT work
addcontext { print "HELLO "; char.name }