Warscale - Home improvements
by Guimo · 09/08/2008 (1:22 am) · 3 comments
Hi all you in this amazing community!
So, last week I managed to get the prototype working which is a complete breakthrough for me but there were lot of things remaining and, as my real timeline for the prototype was on September 15, I had 2 weeks ahead to make things better.
Now, I dont know you but even when the Torque engine has amazing tools, the GUI elements are a little hard to use and customize and the profiles are not really well documented and in most cases you will need to hack them in order to make them work as you want. I'm not complaining, in game development you are supposed to hack everything in order to make it work as you want, I would only like a tool to make it easier to customize everything. Creating the profiles for all the borders I need, cutting small rectangles, editting the alpha maps, testing how it works (if it works at all)... too time consuming.
One of the most difficult objects (at least for me) is the Scroll control. Just the basic number of elements it uses makes it really hard to create a mask. Also, it is designed to stretch the center of the thumb (the slider) and the scroll bar graphic and sometimes you really want to show some details in your GUI. Also it doesnt handles graphics for the extremes of the bars. So I decided to make some modifications to this control and after two days of code fixing and creating bitmaps arrays I managed to get an improved scroll control which you can see in the screenshots.
The second problem was to create some small behavior changes to the bitmap border control in order to allow it to wrap the border (not stretch it) and render the border under the contained controls in some cases. I had already wroked out some of the issues previously so it was easy to solve.
With these things solved I decided to try and improve the GUI presentation. I think have squeezed every pixel on the screen in order to keep a nice presentation while allowing for the maximum view. There are still some things to work out like the Grid being rendered over the scroll, but its coming fine and we are still at prototype stage after all.
So, on the last week, I'm deciding to rebuild the starting screens and rebuild the initial GUI screens in order to greet you with the login screen and make the menu appear with the ESC key allowing to change the graphics, sounds, etc.
Nothing else for now. Thank you for your attention and as usual, good luck with your projects!
Guimo
So, last week I managed to get the prototype working which is a complete breakthrough for me but there were lot of things remaining and, as my real timeline for the prototype was on September 15, I had 2 weeks ahead to make things better.
Now, I dont know you but even when the Torque engine has amazing tools, the GUI elements are a little hard to use and customize and the profiles are not really well documented and in most cases you will need to hack them in order to make them work as you want. I'm not complaining, in game development you are supposed to hack everything in order to make it work as you want, I would only like a tool to make it easier to customize everything. Creating the profiles for all the borders I need, cutting small rectangles, editting the alpha maps, testing how it works (if it works at all)... too time consuming.
One of the most difficult objects (at least for me) is the Scroll control. Just the basic number of elements it uses makes it really hard to create a mask. Also, it is designed to stretch the center of the thumb (the slider) and the scroll bar graphic and sometimes you really want to show some details in your GUI. Also it doesnt handles graphics for the extremes of the bars. So I decided to make some modifications to this control and after two days of code fixing and creating bitmaps arrays I managed to get an improved scroll control which you can see in the screenshots.
The second problem was to create some small behavior changes to the bitmap border control in order to allow it to wrap the border (not stretch it) and render the border under the contained controls in some cases. I had already wroked out some of the issues previously so it was easy to solve.
With these things solved I decided to try and improve the GUI presentation. I think have squeezed every pixel on the screen in order to keep a nice presentation while allowing for the maximum view. There are still some things to work out like the Grid being rendered over the scroll, but its coming fine and we are still at prototype stage after all.
So, on the last week, I'm deciding to rebuild the starting screens and rebuild the initial GUI screens in order to greet you with the login screen and make the menu appear with the ESC key allowing to change the graphics, sounds, etc.
Nothing else for now. Thank you for your attention and as usual, good luck with your projects!
Guimo
#2
09/10/2008 (6:45 am)
One trick I use to make changes to a gui control or profile used by a gui control is define (new) the profile at the top of the .gui file (above the object write begin), then also have a function at the top like this:function execAIEditorGui()
{
if ( isObject( AIEditorGui ) )
AIEditorGui.delete();
if ( isObject( AIEditorProfile ) )
AIEditorProfile.delete();
exec("./AIEditorGui.gui");
Canvas.pushDialog( AIEditorGui );
}So then I can tweak the value of some profile or gui field and then run that function in the console to see the result. 
Torque Owner Jason "fireVein" Culwell