Don't expect the current draft files to look incredible (they don't). I think the point is that it's a relatively clean slate for what the interface could look like. Once beerdude puts his petty personal needs on hold (food? pfft) and gets it released, people will see it and a few will, no doubt, build something sexier because they can.
Nice. I had no idea it could be modified in HTML. That's a big move, HTML is very easy to work with. The biggest challenge I had to deal with the old system was to try to do as much as I could with no access to the code (it was hardcoded into the game). Now, I suppose, you could easily mess around with it and just preview it in any browser. It was a pain in the ass to test stuff with the old "implement - launch game - see how it looks - go back to windows - design - implement..."
Simple. Because it won't have every element recalculated on every frame. Every. Single. Element. Every. Single. Frame. The current GUI, your health didn't change? TOO BAD, recalculate the entire thing anyway. Didn't fire a bullet? Oh well, still gotta' recalculate it. Just sitting there with the vehicle menu open, not even doing anything, not changing it at all? Fuck it, we got time, lets recalculate that too! The actual drawing'll be a little bit more expensive, but that's amortized by the reduction in the number of things that are recalculated in any given frame.
wait... so if someone hits a menu button... they will take a massive hit and then FPS is golden? I could live with that.
I dunno about shift+click, but I do agree that menus (especially the vehicle menu) should require far less navigation. Like just clicking the engine/armor/weapon puts it in an available slot, and similarly clicking a slot that is currently filled on your vehicle removes the item from the slot. And the menu itself could be made simpler to look like this: And the armor plate selection would be around the picture of the vehicle with the weapon slots, and the armor and engine slots could be in the corners closest to their respective sections of the menu or something. That way you don't have to click into a separate area for armor and engine or open a pull-down menu to select your vehicle etc. I imagine there are already plans as to how to redo the vehicle GUI, but this is how I would personally do it.
Senor, I'm interested in how are you are dealing with weapon grouping. I also get the feeling that in order to fit all of that in, the icons and text are going to need to be quite small and the panels will require a lot of scrolling. Personally, I would do it with two tabs, Armour and engine, then weapon and weapon grouping. In the second tab, adding and taking away weapons dynamically adds and removes groups from the grouping panel. Basically the key is to be able to open the menu and with one click it should build the current loadout (unless there is a problem with it).
why would it? calculating the current gui doesnt impact your fps in that way either and its recalculating each frame. even if you distribute calculation over several frames the effect for you as player would be barely noticeable.
The problem I have is I wanted to avoid tabs like we have now as much as possible. They're not ideal especially when you are in a rush to get that vehicle out. I do see your point, it would be amazing to one click and build your loadout without having to see the weapon grouping. My answer: I'm not sure how I would deal with weapon grouping. A weapon grouping tab, maybe, that hopefully people wouldn't need to use as often as they do now. Maybe take the weapons you've added and automatically assign them to M1/M2 and groups based on type - similar to how the LT/AFV comes set up. Personally manual weapon grouping is one of my least favorite things about this menu - I want the game to do that for me. There are very few situations where I would want to bother doing anything besides cannons on one, missiles on other or something similar. I would still like weapon, armor and engine selection on one screen - though I do understand concerns about having to scroll through the panels. I'd have to go and see what the current icons/descriptions look like. I imagine it could be done so that the armor and engine panels, maybe even the weapons panel, have two columns that are separated into unlabelled sections of mg, cn, and ml. So, more fleshed out, it would be like this: Though the idea would be to not have to use the weapon grouping menu very often, maybe have some indication of what groups/mouse button it's assigned to underneath the weapon slots - but that's a step towards making the menu super confusing and complicated again. Not having that would mean that people would have to either always choose the weapon grouping tab or implicitly trust that the automatic grouping doesn't suck really bad - hopefully the latter. Also those lines going from parts of the vehicle to weapon slots are useless and unnecessary - just clutter on the screen. I regret adding them.
This just pretty rockin. I think there's an existing html file for the vehicle creation. Go check it out in the game files and see if you can either change it to work better or make your own. Beer dude would probably be happy to support you. Rock on.
I kind of agree with this. My problem with having the weapon slots/mouse button choices right there is that it's difficult to make it obvious what it's there for and over-complicates or otherwise clutters the menu. Honestly, I think the whole manual weapon grouping thing should be foregone altogether - but I'm sure that would lead to more complaints than is the norm. The idea in having the separate tab is that people should hopefully never have to look at it unless they're so dead set in their ways that they have to have 4 groups with one ML each or something silly.
Generating an html page is usually fairly inefficient and a memory hog when compared to strait up generating a forum internally.
