Free Allegiance Forums

Hey ho..

A long time ago Madpeople started a project to resize the GUI of alleg.
What is a GUI, its Graphic User Interface, in short the Ship chose and load out screen is a GUI, Splash screens(the picture which is showing the MOTD), these are GUI's some got interaction, some just display a picture and some text.
Either way... they are not a priority nor do we need them for the game to function correctly, but they are a part of the general feel of the game like Hirez textures and smooth high poly models, which we don't need either to play the game.
But we like peaty pictures, disco balls and roller skates... (ups wrong post)

Lets get back to what Madpeople intended, and what he stopped doing.
Madpeople intended to change the GUI to match almost all screen sizes, so that the game could be view in full screen at all times with out one having to hurl in the basket every 10 min...(some call this early pregnancy) I call this artistic vanity(well you get the "picture").
When i say almost that would be alot of work... we have alot of different resolution to match.
But we only have 3 major screen scales 16:9, 16:10 and 4:3.
The scale is a guide line for our resolution choice, we have to pick lowest resolution possible that we want to target and the 3 highest resolutions we are going to work for.
When i say "work for" its because we need to make the highest resolution and scale that down to the target size.

A resize need's a visuel modification and code modification to make it reality.
Code change? Well in a manner of speaking, we need to modify the .mdl that handle the layout of the GUI's, Cortexs mod is good example of this.
So before we start a discussion on how to change the code lets look at the target screen size and our work size!
Also speak up on what you think we should do to accomplish this task.

One thing i was thinking about is a remake of the MAIN BASE GUI(the one where we chose the different panels in base).
This GUI is a Classic 3D which is converted to 2D(normal picture) with slide show overlay on the different interactive areas.
This GUI is the major task since its a GUI we use the most.

Do you get the picture?

OK.. before we get all hot and h, we want to know a little about how the .mdl works, for this i encourage you to read up on the ksero's doc and study some of the more simple GUI's and see how they are constructed.

Well that's all for now.. Zapper need's to get back to work
But fire away with questions on how to go about this and what else you you want to say.


Z

you will find that some things do need code changes.

i believe the things which you click on in the loadout screen for example are hardcoded that size, someone previousl;y tried to make them bigger, but only the part of their icon that was in the pre-defined area was visible.

also, the areas where text is shown in things like the inflight f4 screen are hardcoded that size, i managed to double the size of the pane and the text, but only the text which was in the pre-defined area (which was now the top 1/4 of the area available) was visible.

also, quite a lot of fonts are hardcoded to use the same style, which can make things trickier when you want to double the size of one, but not the other (actually it makes it impossible as they use the same style so have to be the same size). but depending on how things go, i might have a stab at this in the summer, unless someone wants to do it first, it's a very simple code change going through and making the text styles point to unique styles link

link to one of my X2 project threads: http://www.freeallegiance.org/forums/index...showtopic=30632
i originally tried to double the size of everything (to make things easier)
flingpu also worked on a similar project which i have a copy of (when i later tried to do mine again, i merged my original attempts with his)
i will upload my project files later if they would help get things rolling. they are the in flight ones, not in base ones.
edit, http://www.mesialonline.com/madpeople/bighudDEV.zip has both mine and flingpu's enlarged versions.

note, i think the dialog.mdl s in them are pre-R4, so you would need to go through with winmerge or something and copy the applicable changes across

I've been asked to comment on this, but even if not asked I would have commented anyway, assuming I found this thread /wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink.gif" />

There are many areas of the code I do not know well, this is one of them, so I hope others from the dev team will speak up here. I can also raise this topic in the dev forum.

I do not know how 'hard coded' things are at the moment. If we are talking mostly of scaling and the need to resize the 'mouse click' areas of images that can likely be moved out of the code and read from mdl.

I'd talk to Cortex and other who have done GUI mods and see what has 'tied their hands' in the past and what they would need available mdl wise to make this possible. We'd need larger artwork, but madpeople (and others) can generate that as needed.

Dog

Dogbones wrote:QUOTE (Dogbones @ Apr 14 2008, 04:24 PM) I do not know how 'hard coded' things are at the moment. If we are talking mostly of scaling and the need to resize the 'mouse click' areas of images that can likely be moved out of the code and read from mdl.

that would be what i would think needs to be done, i believe those areas sizes (and maybe relative positions) are hard coded. i don't know for sure, but i am fairly certain the sizes are hard coded, but everything's top left corner remained in its correct position when things got re-sized.
QUOTE I'd talk to Cortex and other who have done GUI mods and see what has 'tied their hands' in the past and what they would need available mdl wise to make this possible. We'd need larger artwork, but madpeople (and others) can generate that as needed.[/quote]
well, one of the things (not counting the hard coded sizes of clickable things and windows where images and text show through) was that fonts used in different places for different things are hard coded
see thread
which is very easy to fix (a case of using a search in the source for the word "font" and changing the hits to point to unique styles [which is just a duplicate of what it currently uses, but wit ha different name])
also, i think the alt+f fonts may be hard coded not to use any modifiable styles