cocos2d disable touches to all other views - cocos2d-iphone

Question

Below is what I came up with. Wonder if there's easier way to do it.
Suppose I want only menu layer to be touchable while it's up.
I put invisible layer that will swallow touches.
bool tNoTouchLayer::init()
{
if(!CCLayer::init()) {
return false;
}
setIsTouchEnabled(true);
return true;
}
void tNoTouchLayer::registerWithTouchDispatcher()
{
CCDirector::sharedDirector()->getTouchDispatcher()->addTargetedDelegate(this, 0, true);
}
bool tNoTouchLayer::ccTouchBegan(CCTouch *pTouch, CCEvent *pEvent)
{
return true;
}
Now I can add the noTouchLayer before adding menu layer, and all touches would be stolen by noTouchLayer.

Answer 1

Lastly, i did find more info on this:
http://code.google.com/p/cocos2d-iphone/issues/detail?id=1033
the reason that menu items are stealing touches is because menu items have their touch priority set to the highest (lowest char value) possible...
you can change kCCMenutouchPriority to be 0 instead.

Answer 2

That's how you do it as far as I can tell. Note however that your code will not disable any menues added to the scene. To do that you have to remove the menu from the touch dispatcher when adding the popup and add it back again when removing the popup.
To remove a menu from the touch dispatcher you can do the following:
CCDirector::sharedDirector()->getTouchDispatcher()->removeDelegate(menu);
and to add it back you can do this:
CCDirector::sharedDirector()->getTouchDispatcher()->addTargetedDelegate(menu, kCCMenuHandlerPriority, true);
where menu is your CCMenu node.
As a tip, I created a class like the one above but I also added the popup menu to it, creating one touch blocking menu in one node. :)

Answer 3

this isn't exactly the answer you are looking for, but here's something up for thought:
if you're trying to do this for a pop-up, would it be possible to try to pop up a subclass of UIAlertView (one that looks the way you want it to)?
http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/iphone/ios-sdk-uialertview-custom-graphics/

Answer 4

Here's another approach:
keep state of the app and which layer is "on top".
in each of your menu listeners, have them all do a check to see if the state of your current layer should allow for that menu button to be pressed.
also, you can override "addchild" to see if it's a MenuItem, and if it is a MenuItem, then have it check to see if it should be enabled. if not, return immediately instead of executing the rest of the code

Answer 5

If I understand your question correctly, I guess you try to do something like "pause screen" to pop up and disable all other layers.
Well, you said in your comment that you won't like to enable touch event in other areas but not your pop-up's area. Basically, I would think we should think in term of layer for easier understanding, and easier to implement.
Let's see if we have "main layer" which holds other game objects to show as its childs (assume that they also are running animation). Now you touch a button and want to pop up "pause layer". You have to do the following in order to disable all touch event from others layer + objects.
Pause layers' schedule and actions [via pauseSchedulerAndActions()]
Pause all of its game objects inside the layer (ie. enemies) [via pauseSchedulerAndActions()]
Disable CCMenu object (if any), this will ignore touch event on CCMenu related object ie.CCMenuItemImage [via setEnabled(false)]
Disable touch event for layer itself [via setTouchEnabled(false)]
The first 2 points are about stop running any schedule method, and animation.
The latter 2 points are about stop accepting touch event. You can see that CCMenu* related class maintains its own touch event separately from CCLayer, thus we need to do additional effort by set to both CCMenu* object and the layer itself.
I tried this and it works well for me. Also it's better as we don't have to involve setting dispatcher directly in my opinion.