I am doing serious games and simulations and I sometimes have the need to represent actions to the user that they can only do once. Basically the user issues a command that only needs to be done once. This is something that does not really have a corresponding standard gui element. The problems are
- Communicating to the users that once this action has been perform they will not be able to do it again (i.e. forward looking telling the user that this is a one-time thing)
- Communicating after the fact that this has already happend (easiest done by deactivating the piece of gui)
I have tried various elements but none are really ideal so I am happy to hear about any input from this community. Have you had a similar problem, how did you solve it ?
The easy ones are using buttons or checkboxes that get deactivated after being used. These work but the fact that they only work once has to be communicated verbally.
Addition 2010-dec-12
I appreciate all the comments and this is helping a lot, thanks. I see some very game oriented solutions come up and while I personally would like to be able to do something like that and use lots of contextual icons. We can't do that due to cost and personnel. Our simulation/game interfaces are very text driven the pandemic response simulator is one example of that. In that project I used something similar to evalica's suggestion.