Well the problem isn't so much that there aren't enough tools around (although i could do with a simple conditional statement and a way to convert numberstrings to decimals. O yeah, and a sane way to do >= and <= comparisons).
It's that the existing ones are so unwieldy. Most of the time i'm just blindly copying parameters that i know don't really seem to make a difference, but without which the game crashes.
Take the blendmodes. There's a BlendModeAdd, BlendModeSource, BlendModeSourceAlpha and BlendModeSourceAlphaTest.
Now to be fair, the last one i don't remember trying, but Source and SourceAlpha seem to have the exact same result as having no blending at all.
All the ImportImages have a boolean in them. Only in the case of importimage3d does changing that boolean make any difference.
Stuff that works in one case, refuses to work in another and to novice coders like myself, it's frustratingly unclear why.
ScaleImage works beautifully, provided you hard-code the size you want the image to be. Since the engine resizing sucks so much, you'd want to do this by hand. The only reason why I can think of why a tool like that would come in handy, is to scale images by way of gauges. A big picture of a shield that shrinks as the shield drops, say. Only you can't. It just refuses to do anything.
RotateImage is also fun, since its impossible to figure out what unit it uses for its rotation degree. It may be possible to use rotateimage to have gauges that move along different vectors than only horizontally or vertically. It's just really hard to predict which way the image is going to end up.
It's all rather frustrating because there's really no indication of why something went wrong, what a given function can do, and Ksero's documentation is not complete, plus his explanation of the mdl language is completely incomprehensible to me.
I've been droning on about transparency, because i think it's the single most important bit of eyecandy lacking in the came. Sure, it's superficial, but this interface is practically an antique. What use are high-polygon asteroids if all the onscreen icons have black edges because we cant get the blending right?
Hence this wiki article. I figured i'd just describe my experiences with the functions i use and encounter. I may be doing things wrong, i may be using functions in the wrong spot, whatever. I figure i just write down what i know and we'll see from there. Should we ever get serious about developing a new UI for this game, we will have something to work with.
(edit: i'm kind of proud of the way i segwayed this topic back on its rails )
Wiki: Modifying the User Interface
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Bunnywabbit
- Posts: 965
- Joined: Sun May 15, 2005 7:00 am
- Location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Last edited by Bunnywabbit on Mon Apr 19, 2010 9:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
current version r158 new beta as of jan 23 2012
ACS grad since 2nd Feb. 2010