GUI Design

[Winter]

Zapkitty, your heart's in the right place, but I reckon that drop-down would be a pain in the arse for both devs and players. Cut that part entirely and replace it with actor selection by hotkeys. 1-0 for the first 10 actors, then shift+1-0 for the next 10. I don't think we'll need more than that.

Regards,
Winter

[Marte]

+1 for buttons for just first, prev, next, last and no drop-down list: simply, elegant solution (maybe using icons <<, <, >, >> ?)

[MXcom]

Please do not remove the one-button-per-soldier - I would feel horribly lost if I had only a "next" and a "previous" button, as it was in X-Com.
On the contrary, I would actually like seeing these buttons extended with a little bit of information about each soldier, e.g. two (very small) bars, one for TUs and one for health.
The first one would e.g. spare me from what I'm doing up till now every turn: Flipping through all soldiers to see if I accidentally forgot to move one; the second one would e.g. spare me from doing the same if I know someone was hurt in alien turn, but don't know exactly who.

Jagged Alliance had such info (they only had to fit 8 though): http://forevergeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/jagged-alliance_2.png

[Kildor]

MXcom, look to the altHUD.

[H-Hour]

About the # of soldiers and the GUI. What about a slider design, where it displays n soldiers at the top and you can then scroll left or right (using a slider or buttons) to show different numbers. See the attached image. When clicking on the right arrow it would show new soldier numbers.

Not to create too much work for the coders, but perhaps it could also display a certain amount of information about each unit as it scrolled through, like the attached image. But it could work just as well without the details.

[Duke]

I like the slider design, as it is not too far away from the the current design.
But as the 'additional info' is displayed elsewhere in the HUD anyway once the soldier is selected, we shouldn't duplicate that info in the slider imho.

[Marte]

I like the slider design, as it is not too far away from the the current design.
But as the 'additional info' is displayed elsewhere in the HUD anyway once the soldier is selected, we shouldn't duplicate that info in the slider imho.

i agree

[Ain Soph Aur]

slider design sounds interesting. thumbs up

[Marte]

H-Hour can you post a mockup of all battlescape gui proposal?

[H-Hour]

H-Hour can you post a mockup of all battlescape gui proposal?

No, sorry, the little time I have I'm focusing on getting the +city RMA up and running for 2.3. Destructavator has already indicated he's working on a GUI and there's already a well-developed proposal somewhere in the Wiki.

[Bartleby]

Destructavator still working on this? cant wait to see a new gui .

[Destructavator]

Destructavator still working on this? cant wait to see a new gui .

Actually I've been forced to put it on hold for a little bit - I still have ideas that I'm more than capable of creating, but I've got a lot of things going on right now.

My life is like that, I don't work a regular 9 to 5 job, I do various odd stuff here and there which makes my spare time wildly jump up and down unpredictably.

If anyone else wants to start a new GUI while I work on other stuff, they're more than welcome to, otherwise I'll get back to it later.

[MCR]

I want to start with the game's menus, backgrounds & loading pictures first...
I would suggest high resolution (1920x1440) jpgs, which the engine can downscale if people running lower resolutions & upscale for the few running higher ones ...
Best for the menus would be our 3d engine rendering the background imho, but that can also wait

I hope it is okay for everyone here, if I start experimenting on some new upgraded styles not forgetting about the roots of this project, but showing visually from the first moment that we are developing 2.4 now ?!

Fresh gfx will showcase our progress with UFO:AI for everyone knowing the old version from the first moment starting the new one !

[TrashMan]

I'd reccomed splitting soldiers into squads of 6-8 men, and hten simply haveing "next squd" and "next sodlier" bottuns.

Kinda like Jagged Alliance did.

[Arthur]

I can make the graphics for the new hud if you want?

mfg