Very very impressive. I'll commit it the moment I get my SVN running again. Ducky, you are fucking awesome, I want you to know that. On the other hand, I just remembered something. ViroMan, you haven't attended a single test since the new ones started up a few months ago. You can get the fuck right out of this forum either way. I should probably prune access regardless.
16:54 - Deif: I think the colour is a bit wrong 16:54 - Deif: and the gradient on the black bars should be plain 16:54 - Deif: the spacing needs sorting 16:54 - Deif: text is too close to buttons on skil menu 16:54 - Deif: the cross in the upper right of the popups looks horrid 16:54 - Deif: a simple cross will do 16:54 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster: yeah the cross is actually getting redone 16:54 - Deif: and it needs to line up with the black bar 16:54 - Deif: the accept and cancel buttons need to be simple 16:55 - Deif: without that random orange thing 16:55 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster: any more 16:55 - Deif: hp car and sprint bar need to fill the lower right 16:55 - Deif: or give them less spacing 16:55 - Deif: ammo also 16:55 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster: lower right 16:55 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster: what 16:55 - Deif: either make big like apple 16:55 - Deif: or decrease blue space 16:55 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster: that's 16:55 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster: code stuff 16:55 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster: not skin stuff 16:55 - Deif: sprint bar is big in normal empires 16:56 - Deif: why is it tiny here 16:56 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster: you mean vertical height? 16:56 - Deif: yeah 16:56 - -₪EPIC₪- Trickster: oh ok Deif wanted me to post shit up because he doesn't have acces yet.
I may not have been at the group tests but, I have done testing on my own and attempted to provided feedback even though the problems I detected were due to some delivery error of the updates.
Alignment of i.e. panel title heading background and the close button varies slightly (and position/size of the text font even more) on different resolutions - this is especially visible on the oddly scaled class menu (all the other panels seem to be ok) and I'm somewhat sure that I cannot fix all the class-panel oddities with gfx/.res alone. HP/Stamina bar have a slight gradient to make them look more rounded, so while they are actually the same size as before, they are perceived 'thinner'. I can do a "flat" version later on, without all the gradient stuff, so we can see in comparison what looks better in the end. And the buttons are ugly, yeah. I'm not sure if I want to completely drop the "random orange" hightlight though, otherwise everything may look too monotonously dark...
Just tested what's in current svn (I know you've updated since last commit), from your screenshots and from testing here's a some of my feedback/opinions: - HP and stamina bars should remain white. (Stamina looks green in your screenshots, looks better white imo.) - HP and stamina bars look tacky with those gradients. (Subtle or no gradients would look better in my opinion, though it may be jpg compression making them look so bad. "jpeg_quality 100" might help?) - I'll agree with Dief on both comments that the exit button looks horrid and that the other buttons dont need the random orange square attached to them. + Radial menu looks nice. (F menu/popup menu) + Health and sprint HUD icons look better now you added colour to them. Some points are what Dief commented on already I know, but If I agree with them I guess its worth repeating. Looking forward to seeing the final product, and again you're awesome for spending time on this stuff. On a related note, the class menu needs fixing. Whatever code change made it scale with resolution needs reverting in my opinion, because it looks awful. Maybe its just my resolution but I doubt that it is.
emp_gui_r7b.zip : Hud-bars flat again, remaining engy/vehicle icons, tweaks on weapon icons, misc small things... Buttons are now without any decoration, which isn't looking as bad as I expected... I can't seem to be able to fix the squad hud colors, and the squad-power-hud symbol is a bit too far from the left screen border - or am I just overlooking something ?
Should have my SVN up and running again either tonight or tomorrow, so I'll update it then. Make sure your last upload has all the files you've created thus far, not just a patch from the previous version of your files.
Has this been updated on the steam content servers? I still get the orange decoration on the buttons. Also is there anything we can do about the button shape? I don't see the point in the random octagon corners (on the hud it's fine as it gives more screen space). The hover white transparant texture looks a bit retarded since that is rectangular without the weird corners. It looks a bit too dark to me - is there something we can do about the brightness of the weapons on the class menu and skill menu? The weapon icons look like they're for a lower res too, so they look pixelated and stretched, should we make them smaller? The spacing between skill 2 and skill 3 is different between 1 and 2/3 and 4 - is this fixable? The icons look cool in the vehicle menu, and the hud looks really cool now. I can't comment on the gradients as I haven't got the updated version, but I do think that without the emboss on the edges of the popup windows (menu, skill, class, squad, etc.) it would look better. Put up a bit of shadow behind if it looks too bland (if this is possible), but I don't think it's a good design decision to have random corners and shapes just to look 'scifi'. The scroll bars are a bit weird too as they have too much detail, they need to be simple and in line with everything else. The squad menu has a scroll bar that doesn't match anything else and it's a bit too fat. Making the buttons bigger might be a good option too, so they're easier to hit. It looks better than the old Empires though once those gradients and orange decorations go.
That would be an old version, so it's probably just in the svn right now... Button and skill-spacing is fixed in the current version, and BE weapons/tank have more contrast against the background etc. - it should resolve some of the issues you mentioned. True, unfortunately the button-type which is used for these does not allow an alternative highlight texture, it just overlays the whole button area with a single-colored rectangle. I'm hesitating to make all the skill-buttons rectangular just because of this... I'll make the highlight more transparent with the next changes and see if that lessens the effect. The whole class menu is stretched in the dev version, which leads to smudgy blurryness with not-so-high screen/window resolutions or smaller screen ratios. I hope this can be reverted before release, so it should hopefully look a bit better then. I think with the panel-background transparency the panels should have a visible outline, shadows can't really extend the panel area enough to be a convincing separation from a changing background... Imo the metallic frame isn't such a bad solution... On a more general note: I noticed that with reduced texture settings ('medium' or lower) the vehicle ammo icons (vf menu) start too look really pixelized (reduced texture size?), which doesn't seem to happen for other gui textures... Is there possibly a way to mark a texture as non-resizable, codewise or even in the .vmt ?
I remember there being an option that you can put in the VMT. Check some of the other VMT's, I suppose
