Thanks for the quick reply.  That was all the help i needed about the 
inspectors.  I had seen that stuff in the tutorials about the 
inspectors, but didn't know to pull them up.  I think it was around 
tutorial 4 when i stopped reading and just decided to dig into the code. 

one more question.  right now, i am simulating an agent broadcasting a 
message to its neighbors by having it put its neighbors in a Bag and 
reading their state information that way.  (this is kind of a 'pull' 
operation as opposed to the real world 'push' operation).  is there a 
better way to simulate sending a message to your neighbors?  also, is 
there any way to simulate line of sight behavior of this message passing? 

thanks again,
-Ben


Sean Luke wrote:
> MASON has facilities for inspecting objects automatically by 
> double-clicking on them.  But it has no built-in facilities for user 
> selection and moving.  However, it DOES have easy hooks for them, at 
> least in the 2D environment.
>
> A useful method to examine is Display2D.createInspectors(...).  This 
> method is called when the user double-clicks on the Display2D (by a 
> mouse listener that passed in a 1x1 rectangle at the mouse-click 
> point).  createInspectors calls a method called 
> Display2D.objectsHitBy(rect), which returns an array of Bags, one Bag 
> per FieldPortrayal attached to the Display2D.  Each Bag contains 
> LocationWrappers pointing to all the objects in the fields which 
> intersected with this point.  Display3D has similar methods.
>
> You are free to add a mouse listener, or modify Display2D's, and call 
> objectsHitBy to get the objects yourself and do whatever you like with 
> them.  At present we do not have any method for *changing* the 
> "location" of an object, to move it per se -- mostly because we hadn't 
> bothered to write such a monster yet -- but it's definitely doable.  
> We do have a hook for Portrayals (setSelected(...), unused at the 
> moment) which allows you to tell Portrayals that certain underlying 
> objects have been "selected" by the user -- perhaps he clicked on them 
> one time or something.  But we've not hooked that up yet.  Wouldn't be 
> hard to wire it I guess.
>
> Seann
>
>
> On Feb 14, 2006, at 8:03 PM, Ben Axelrod wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I recently started using MASON a few weeks ago.  I am modifying tutorial
>> 5 for a quick and dirty distributed network simulator.  I would like to
>> allow the user to select a node or group of nodes with the mouse.  (the
>> nodes are now motionless in my simulation).  this selection only needs
>> to set a boolean member variable.  what is the easiest way to do this?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> -Ben
>>
>> PS. I am pretty good with C++, but still new to Java...
>
>