Why does my game freeze when I try and display a menu?

Question

I make a MenuScene when my Game loads, which grabs some intro text from levelData and displays it and a button to start playing the level. When the MenuScene is created and displayed in onLoadComplete() it's fine. However when I display it again when advancing the level (levelData is loaded with new data and the MenuScene reset) it freezes, showing the game at the point the level was beaten. The menu is not displayed at all. I'm just calling

loadIntro();
this.mScene.setChildScene(this.mIntroScene, false, true, true);
this.mEngine.stop();

to display the MenuScene (the same both times, it works the first time but not the second), where loadIntro() is

private void loadIntro() {
            this.mIntroScene = new MenuScene(this.mCamera);

            final TextMenuItem intro = new TextMenuItem(-1, mFont, levelData.getIntroText());
            intro.setBlendFunction(GL10.GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL10.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);
            intro.setSize(400, 150);
            this.mIntroScene.addMenuItem(intro);

            final SpriteMenuItem startMenuItem = new SpriteMenuItem(MENU_START, this.mMenuStartTextureRegion);
            startMenuItem.setBlendFunction(GL10.GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL10.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA);
            this.mIntroScene.addMenuItem(startMenuItem);

            this.mIntroScene.buildAnimations();
            this.mIntroScene.setBackgroundEnabled(false);
            this.mIntroScene.setOnMenuItemClickListener(this);

    }

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Is it possible to use a separate thread for the game action? I'm wondering if the menu being activated is consuming the current thread (this is a guess based on my experience in programming applications in Java that use menus).

I suspect that what's going on is that you have one main thread, and that by activating the menu your code is temporarily halted while the user decides what to do with the menu.