Stages

What are "Stages"?

Stages in ULC are simply a way to change the behavior of buttons to make them behave as a user would expect cyclical/sequential stages (where the next stage includes the last one) to work. This allows stages to properly "build" on each other. The only difference between a button defined as a stage and a standard button is that a stage will maintain awareness of other stages and adjust it's on-off state accordingly.

Consider the example below:

buttons = {
  {label = "Stage 1", key = 1, color = "green", extra = 1, linkedExtras = {}, offExtras = {2,3}},
  {label = "Stage 2", key = 2, color = "green", extra = 2, linkedExtras = {1}, offExtras = {3}},
  {label = "Stage 3", key = 3, color = "green", extra = 3, linkedExtras = {1,2}, offExtras = {}}
},

With this setup, the linked and off extras are almost enough to make a proper stage system. Pressing the stage 3 button would enable both 1 and 2, however, if you were to press 3 then press 2 to downgrade to stage 2, it would actually turn off all three stages since stage 2 was already enabled.

The default behavior of buttons is to disable if it's already enabled. If a button is defined as a stage it will instead check the current stage and if it's a different stage the button will instead remain active and the extras would be set accordingly. Only if the stage is the same as the current stage will all of the stages be disabled.

How to use Stages

Stages are defined in the "stages" section of the ulc.lua configuration file. Simply add any buttons you want to behave as stages to the stageKeys table by their key.

stages = {
  useStages = true,
  stagesKeys = {1, 2, 3}
}

Controls

The default keybindings for stage controls are below.

• NUM 0 - Cycle Stage
• NUM + - Upgrade Stage
• NUM - - Downgrade Stage