Need advice to start new project with a GUI

[ravenfyre]

It's been a while since I used AutoIT to work on a project. In fact I think it's been almost 2 years. I see quite a few things have changed, the implementation of a GUI for one which actually I think will come in handy with my new project.

I need some advice on how to start my new project with the use of a GUI. I may need multiple GUI's but that's what I need help on to determine how many I need.

You see the project is relatively simple, my friends and I will be working on developing one of those interactive board games. I'm sure some of you played them. You pop in a VCR or DVD, play the board game and on the TV it'll give you commands for your next action. I plan to replace the TV with the PC, create our own commands and set them to appear randomly so it doesn't get repetetive.

What I need is the following. First, a real-time countdown timer at the top of the screen. This timer may be affected by the command, either jump forward or backward. Second the actual command screen on the bottom which will show pre-written commands randomly throughout the game until the timer reaches 0. Next these commands will trigger audio and video which will display in the centre of the screen. The video clips are all AVI files I will prepare in 3d animation software.

Since the countdown clock has to be realtime I'm thinking it has to be a seperate script. Since the clock will be affected by certain commands from the main script they obviously have to talk to eachother. As far as I know it is still not possible in AutoIT to have 2 scripts talk to eachother besides reading the title names of the windows. This may have changed so if I am wrong please correct me.

So I'm thinking of setting this up as two scrips with two GUI's filling the screen. One on the top with the clock, and one filling the remainder of the screen that will display the command text on the bottom. When needed the command will trigger the video file which will play in the larger (command) GUI and will display the video in the middle. So you have the clock at the top, video in the middle and command text on the bottom. I'm hoping this will work and that 3 GUI's will not be necessary, the 3rd being for the video itself.

As long as I know how to set this up using these GUI's I can easily proceed from there. I just want to start off right so if you guys have some suggestions please let me know.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give.

[SmOke_N]

Download SciTe

In the tools menu, you will find a program called Koda, it's a GUI Builder, that should solve ALOT of your cosmetic issues quite easily.

Then take a look at TimerInit() / TimerDiff() in the help file for the Timer issues.