What's up

[uzurpator]

Howdy.

I know I've been silent for the past few weeks, but the project lives on .

Three things are underway, first is a rather big performance boost - 3to5-times more then previously. My ultimate goal for the terrain display is supreme-commanderish strategic zoom.

Third thing, is that I am working on the gui, currently implementing basic widgets, such as buttons, title bars etc.

I suspect a test version will be available in a matter of days.

[StopRightThere]

Oooh. Sounds good. Once the GUI is ready, what do you plan to work on next?

[uzurpator]

- Land modification
- Object placement
- Aircraft movement

[ohlidalp]

Hey, my icons in action! Nice! And the progress also sounds very good.
Im still here watching what goes on and ready to do more gui graphics (though my skills havent improved at all ) - So if you need anything particular, you can contact me and I'll do my best. Anyway I'm going to make some more complete gui design now that I see what nice progress is happening..

BTW: Maybe I should post my icons in 32x32 size? (because those resized in your screenshot don't look too nice). Also, the white background is "by-design", or just because the engine doesnt support transparent png-s? I can save it in Targa (.tga), like the hammer is

[Steve]

Progress! Excellent!

As Anoobis is pointing out, we can start to do things in parallel. If you can tell us the exact format gui icons should be, people can get them ready for an easy install!

[uzurpator]

An00bis:

If you want to design a gui, get accustomised with Ogre material scripting. Anything Ogre supports in the material script, is supported by the engine.

Anyhow. A button will be composed of 4 layers, two of which can be displayed at a time:

icon_up
icon_down
back_up
back_down

each of them has a material assigned. There are three states which have the following displays:

button up:
- icon_up and back_up
cursor over the button
- icon_down and back_up
cursor over the button pressed
- icon_down and back_down

I think that the base size of a gui element should be 16px - so each gui cell is 16x16 pixels, so design from that size with 16 px increments (ie 16x32, 16x48, 32x32 etc).

[ohlidalp]

...design a gui..

Well, I'll rather "create a gui" because Im going to continue my "simple but good enough" theme demonstrated by the terraforming pannel posted in the "graphics" subforum - and there isn't much designing done, its rather a slightly modified copy of xTTD theme. I just want you to have gui graphics available so you can continue your work.

...get accustomised with Ogre material scripting

OK, ill have a look, but it will take some time.

button up:
- icon_up and back_up
cursor over the button
- icon_down and back_up
cursor over the button pressed
- icon_down and back_down

I'd rather do it this way:
button up:
-icon_up, back_up (both in normal)
icon mouseover:
-icon_mouseover, back_mouseover (both "highlighted")
icon_down:
-icon_down, back_down (icon in normal or else, button depressed)
because the way i'm planning it icon_up and icon_down will be the same, the only difference will be the button. I cant really imagine how a icon_down should look like. I think mouseover_button should be "highlighted", but again, a pressed button icon looking "highligted" feels strange to me.

[Arathorn]

Is it an idea to make the UI scalable? That way we'll never have to worry about menu sizes for different resolutions. Off course it should be easy and comfortable enough for both Uzu and An00bis to work with.

[Hyronymus]

Is it an idea to make the UI scalable? That way we'll never have to worry about menu sizes for different resolutions. Off course it should be easy and comfortable enough for both Uzu and An00bis to work with.

Wasn't that the whole point of using vector graphics?

[uzurpator]

An00bis

For such arrangement you need three, not 6 materials (you can combine arbitrarily many texture layers in a material).

What I imagined:
back_up, icon_up (icon alpha blended onto the back, which is common for several buttons) - normal button.

back_up, icon_down - icon material changed into some sort of animation showing the selected button and maybe giving a tool-tip.

back_down, icon_down - indicating button press, with the icon still animated.

But frankly - your method is good enough, but more material-scripting intensive.

Arathorn:

The plan is to make gui resizable, but in 16px increments.

Hyro:

Vector gui = helluva work. It is possible to add models into the gui elements, but since we have no models, so it is out, at least for now.

[m3henry]

The way I would do it?
The like-Firefox method; an image table for each button and size showing each required mode: inactive, active, mouse over and depressed
or, group same sized buttons into one table

[bob27]

I would go with the way m3henry said it, it would be much easier IMHO.

[ohlidalp]

Uzurpator,

You're right with the material arrangement for the buttons. I was thinking of a 2D bitmap gui first

I'm reading about the material scripting now and I don't think I'll learn it very soon, so I guess I'll just draw the graphics now and do the scripts later.

I don't really understand your resizing method and that 16px rule.
[quote=Uzurpator]I think that the base size of a gui element should be 16px - so each gui cell is 16x16 pixels[/quote]
What do you mean by "element" and "cell"? Is element icon or button? Do you mean that for example a button with text can only have n*16 x m*16 in size, like 16*64? Also, I can't imagine how resizing by 16px increments should look like. If you resize for example 16*64 button by 16 in width, the height should be 20 (if you keep the aspect-ratio) but that is not n*16. In short - I don't know what you mean at all.

[uzurpator]

An00bis

its really simple - normal gui has the smallest element of 1 pixel. Our gui has smallest element of 16x16 pixels. Every widget, has to have a size that is a multiplication of it.

If an element is resized, then its resize function has to take it into consideration - ie center what needs to be centered where it needs to be etc. and to keep all elements at n*16 x m*16px.

As for scripting - simple translucency is the hammer cursor.

[IANF]

I'm a Supreme commander lover myself and it would be nice to see that kind of zoom implemented into other games. however i am a bit skeptical on it's uses in this application

[Expresso]

Huh? What? That type of zoom would be reall useful to games like this.