Posted by Sean P. DeNigris on Feb 05, 2014; 6:28pm
URL: https://forum.world.st/How-to-Understand-Exisiting-Components-tp4741792.html

I share the following as a contribution, fwiw…

Where should I be looking for answers? Is there a tutorial for exploring the system? I've seen videos of how to plug together existing components, but I'm interested in digging into them to learn to build my own...

Lively Engine Experience:
  - Investigating Buttons
    - Let's say I want to see what the "2 cylinders" button does. I bring up the halo, but the button also fires. When I select "M", the menu briefly flashes, then disappears. I finally [1] figure out I have to hold the mouse down to keep the menu open (awkward).
    - the start and ignition buttons will not bring up halos at all
    - Okay, I have an inspector and object editor open for the button, but they show no scripts, and the menu shows no connections
  - The inspector
    - To look at the text in the ignitionMenu, I have to discover: ignitionMenu->itemMorphs->0->textChunks->0->chunkNode->childNodes->0->data

Questions:
- How to find out what a button does?
- How to bring up an inspector on a sub-item? The standard cmd+shift+i doesn't do anything

[1] I say finally because the fact that the button was firing made me think that the menu was closing because the cylinder chooser appeared. I wasn't until I got the menu open on the step button and experienced the same thing that I understood that to be the "normal" menu behavior for buttons. Moral: multiple confusing things are more confusing that the sum of their parts