11. Overlay that shows the name of connected players

We will now create a list that is displayed in the top left corner of the screen and will look something like this:

A preview of the player list

Create a new object htme_obj_playerlist with no sprite, make it persistent so it exists in both game rooms, and place it in htme_rom_demo.

This new object is actually not going to be added to the engine. This object will simply look for all existing htme_obj_player instances and write their metadata on the screen.

The only thing we’ll need is a Draw-Event.

Let’s start with drawing the word “Players:” on screen:

draw_set_color(c_white);
draw_text(40,35,"Players:");

Okay, cool, cool. But how on earth do we get all player instances? There are two possibilites:

1. You could use with htme_obj_player {/*Code*/} to loop through all player instances
2. The engine provides some tools to get a list of all connected players and a function to get an instance that is controlled by a particular player.

In our case the first solution is the easiest. However we want to teach you what you can do with the engine, and so we are going to use the second method. There might be cases where looping through all instances of an object would be simply to much, for example if you have a race game with 2 players and 6 cpus and you only want to get data of the connected players.

var playerlist = htme_getPlayers();

This will give you a ds_list containing the hashes of all players. Each player is identifed by a random 8 character hash.

To loop over this list, add the following for-loop:

for(var i = 0;i<ds_list_size(playerlist);i++) {
    var player = ds_list_find_value(playerlist,i);
}

player will now be the playerhash of a player. We use this hash to get a player instance of this player. Inside the for loop after ``var player =...`` insert the following:

var instance = htme_findPlayerInstance(htme_obj_player,player);

This will either return an instance or -1. It will return -1 when the player is in another room, because no instance for this player exists. And that’s a problem.

Because that means we can’t actually get the name of the player to display it then. That’s a limitation because we store the player name with our player object. After this tutorial is over you should be able to solve this issue, and I challenge you to do so!

Because of this limitation we will simply show “(other room)” in a grey color, when the player instance does not exist:

if (instance != -1) {
    var name = (instance).name;
    var _image_blend = (instance).image_blend;
} else {
    var name = "(Other room)";
    var _image_blend = c_gray;
}

``name`` now contains the name of the current player and ``_image_blend`` the color.

The following code will draw the sprite and the name:

//Draw small player icon
draw_sprite_ext(htme_spr_player,0,50,(i)*20+70,0.5,0.5,0,_image_blend,1);
//Draw player name
draw_set_colour(_image_blend);
draw_text(70,(i)*20+62,name);

Remember, all of this must go into the for-loop.

Start the game and test it out, our player list should work just fine.