I have some ideas to improve the GUI... Because I am new on this stuff... how does it work? Where can I change things like "Research Tree" or "Class Selection"? Do you have examples, how to edit/create the GUI?
a lot of it is hardcoded, you can swap out certain elements but real change doesnt look like a realistic option. beerdude is working on a new implementation which relies on xml. depending on your ideas and their technicalities you either wait or explain them to be considered during creation.
The GUI is being overhauled. Please refer to: http://forums.empiresmod.com/showthread.php?t=18450 http://forums.empiresmod.com/showthread.php?t=18656 http://forums.empiresmod.com/showthread.php?t=18666
Basically... make an HTML page the way you want the GUI to look and your set for now until beerman get the code completely in.
Research tree hasn't been touched yet. I create extremely rudimentary HTML UIs for testing purposes. Not sure if it's already in the current version, but if there's a folder 'html' in your Empires install folder, you can find what's currently available there.
Seems like this is as good a place as any to ask - Does the current release of Empires use any files in the html folder or the resource/ui/chrome folder?
Oh, then it's possible to create loading bars? Look at http://aktuell.de.selfhtml.org/artikel/javascript/fader-framework/ladebalken.htm and click on "animieren". Well I should check the Empires folders :D
So you're saying if someone submitted a new loading screen, then it would and should be used by the game? That answers muh question!
Yeah, there's a "loading bar"-like thing for the XP overview (still WIP, may not be in current version). Animated elements are not recommended in the loading screen panel, by the way, any animations will slow to a crawl (one frame update every 5 seconds or something) when the engine starts loading stuff.
Nope, tried that. It's still written to a texture from the engine, and that's the part that bottlenecks.
Feel free to mess around with the code until you can get a video to render without hiccups during loading :p EDIT: Also, it's just a Chrome instance, you can already use HTML5 video
That's already running on a different thread (it's the Awesomium DLL), but you always have to copy the buffer containing the image to a buffer that the engine will render. I don't know if you can say "just render this texture over the entire screen, bypassing the engine completely". We need to bypass the engine completely because it only renders like 7 times in 10 seconds or something during the last parts of loading.
