Wait until button pressed(QT)

Question

this is my first post on SO ^_^

I'm trying to implement a letter scramble game with QT framework. The main part is finished, but now i'm stunned - i can't figure out how to make program to wait for button to be pressed inside of a game.

Please help me with it. Thanks in advance

Here is pseudocode of my gaming cycle:

//initialize grid, score, time

// accept words until timer expires
while (true)    {

    // draw the current state of the grid

    // log board

    // get current time

    // report score

    // check for game's end

    // report time remaining

    // prompt for word and converting it to char*
    //HOW TO WAIT UNTILL BUTTON PRESSED????!!!!

    // check whether to scramble grid

    // or to look for word on grid and in dictionary
}

P.S. Since it's my first post here, i'll appreciate any suggestions on how to compose questions more correctly.

Answer 1

It appears to me that what you're missing is that Qt is based on event-driven programming. Qt provides widgets / objects such as buttons, windows, controllers etc which you display to the user. A QPushButton object, for example, is able to receive various events, such as those from clicking a mouse button, or pressing a keyboard key and many more.

With events, Qt provides a slot / signal mechanism for receiving those events and reacting to them. So, as an example, in the case of a QPushButton, there's a signal called 'pressed'. When the user clicks on the button, its pressed signal is emitted. You, as the developer, can connect the pressed signal to a slot, which is a function that you define.

For example, in a class called MyClass that is derived from QObject: -

QPushButton button("Select"); // create a QPushButton object
connect(button, SIGNAL(pressed()), this, SLOT(buttonPressed()));

The connect statement connects the button's 'pressed' signal to the slot function called 'buttonPressed'. You would then define that function: -

void MyClass::buttonPressed()
{
    // handle the button pressed event....
}

So you don't actually have any calls to wait for the button to be pressed as the framework and it's architecture is designed this way and you shouldn't need to be putting everything in a while(true) loop.