July 26, 2009 in Blog, Coding & Scripting by Raiyan

The Right-Click Menu in Flash

The right click menu is actually called the context menu. I did not know that. I had to go through several forums and blogs on the net before stumbling upon this piece of information.

Usually one does not need to bother about this menu. But if you are working on a game, you might want to disable this menu. Because the ‘play’ option in the context menu gives your user the ability to play the movie when you would rather have it to stopped. I leave it up to your imagination figuring out how one can cheat or mess things up from here.

To disable the context menu, put this line of code on the first frame, or in any other frame from where you want the context menu to be disabled.

stage.showMenu =  false ;

This will not actually disable the context menu, but hide most parts of it.

Disabling the context menu would help those would be cheaters from cheating their way through your game. But that’s not all we can do with this menu. We can also add some customized menu options as well. To do so, one has to follow these simple steps.

• Make a new context menu
• Create customized menu item
• Attach event listener with the custom menu item
• Insert the custom item into the new menu
• Set the new menu as the current context menu

For example, in our games we usually put a customized menu item linking back to our homepage. To do this, we use the following piece of code.

function initMenu() {
	var m:String='© muktosoft';

	var cm:ContextMenu=new ContextMenu();
	var item:ContextMenuItem=new ContextMenuItem(m);

	item.addEventListener(ContextMenuEvent.MENU_ITEM_SELECT,gotoMukto_);
	cm.hideBuiltInItems();
	cm.customItems.push(item);
	this.contextMenu = cm ;

}

function gotoMukto_(evt:ContextMenuEvent):void {
	navigateToURL(new URLRequest("http://www.muktosoft.com"), "_blank");
}