GUI Brainstorming

[Dakal]

Like my others posts i'm focused on GUI. It's just ideas. If you have one post yours below.

-The backgrounds (red/green/blue) sucks but the idea is to keep a colour code
-Icons system on the top, like in "the sims" game. If you want to go on the previous menu simply click on the icon.

[asciimonster]

-The backgrounds (red/green/blue) sucks but the idea is to keep a colour code.

Indeed they do suck, but the idea of colour coding the menus is nice. In 0.6 I always get confused in what game mode I currently am (normal, time trial, follow leader). Using colour coding there is really helpful.

We need a generic background that can be changed colorized to any colour you want. Het checkered flag logically is not the best option.

-Icons system on the top, like in "the sims" game. If you want to go on the previous menu simply click on the icon.

Nice idea, maybe add the text "Go to:" to show people the can click there. For me, that's not clear in the mockup.

[rudy85]

Nice work

[Dakal]

We need a generic background that can be changed colorized to any colour you want. Het checkered flag logically is not the best option.
Nice idea, maybe add the text "Go to:" to show people the can click there. For me, that's not clear in the mockup.

Yes we need a great background like a 3D render of tracks or characters in action
Maybe for the icons system a tooltip under the icon like on the start menu.

[Auria]

Dakal : not bad ideas I like the little bubble on hover idea. now of course we need someone to actually code that ^^ Which is not that easy since we need to decide if the bubble appears above or below (we can't always use above, e.g. in the first menu if you hover "challenges" the bubble should probably not appear over the STK logo)

Now, I agree that orange and green don't fit together; the peach skin probably goes in the right direction, and we're always open to more skins Before release we will look at what skins we have and choose a default one.

[vjuk]

WOW very nice kart selection and start screen i like it! the background is pretty nice too. if it would be made exactly like this that would be AWSOME

[Dakal]

WOW very nice kart selection and start screen i like it! the background is pretty nice too. if it would be made exactly like this that would be AWSOME

We can do something better like this, it's mockup but thanks.

[Arthur]

Yes we need a great background like a 3D render of tracks or characters in action

Something along these lines?
http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/2172/lighthouse.png

[rudy85]

Character animation , I could

[xapantu]

Yes we need a great background like a 3D render of tracks or characters in action

Something along these lines?
http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/2172/lighthouse.png

It is great Maybe you should add some subsurf to the top of the lighthouse ?

[Arthur]

Thanks. Yeah, I thought about it, but it changed the shape a bit too much IMO.

[Dakal]

Something like this is good i think. (with better GUI of course) A bit of transparency to see the background.

I put a a black blur on each edge of the background because with this blur in high resolution you don't need to deform the image. Just put some black background colour and the image fit well.

[Arthur]

Wow, really impressive mockup! Do you want me to continue making renders of other tracks? And what do you think is a good resolution?

[Auria]

Your mockups are impressive, each of them looks very different from the others :/ We'll need to settle on a consistent look

I'm also not sure we want to associate the lighthouse with STK so much, doesn't have much to do with racing and perhaps makes the game look to serious? (at least to me a dark blue lighthouse is associated with a sad rainy day, not with karting )

[Dakal]

Agreed, i don't know where i'was going with my previous mockups. Something in this style i suppose?

The font (in mockup_source) is "Komika Axis" under GPL : http://apostrophic-labs.kernest.com/fonts/komika-axis

[hiker]

I'm also not sure we want to associate the lighthouse with STK so much, doesn't have much to do with racing and perhaps makes the game look to serious? (at least to me a dark blue lighthouse is associated with a sad rainy day, not with karting )

I agree with that. Having one particular track in the GUI means that we have to commit that this track will be with stk 'forever' (I mean we can obviously change it, but then would have to change the background image). It might be a lot easier doing this for a few karts, they are more likely to stick around (or only be updated with a better model). So perhaps a 'generic' kind of road section with a few karts?

But then: we had something like this - the original GotM SuperTuxkart branch, or:
http://supertuxkart.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/supertuxkart/main/branches/0.5rc1/data/textures/st_title_screen.rgb?revision=5781
http://supertuxkart.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/supertuxkart/main/branches/0.6/data/textures/st_title_screen.rgb?revision=3233

Cheers,
Joerg

[Dakal]

About tracks, why not keep tracks for each character?

-Ice field (already in game): Penguin, Mr ice block
-Savannah: Elephant, GNU
-Jungle (already in game): Mozilla
-Aqua track (like in transparent tube): Puffy, Gooey
-Lake: Hexley, Adium
-Clouds: Pidgin
-Castle: Nolok
-Fir forest: Wilber

As you know i'm not a 3D artist so it's only words ...
Damn i want to be a modeler!

[Auria]

Dakal,

I like your mockup. Now, it needs changes to the code, so I'd like if we could all agree on a direction to go before I code anything, obviously

The download file includes names in the png images; obviously we cannot do that because of translations. So I'd prefer to stick with the "bubble" from your earlier mockups.
Regarding the bottom bar in your latest mockup, this may be hard to do too because of varying resolutions, the bar would need to stretch differently in widescreen resolutions and I'm not sure how to do that without the texture looking stretched. So the texture would need to be able to tile or something

About associating a track with a character, this would be a good idea for a commercial game, where they have a team of modellers, but we're open source and we depend on contributions, so we just can't make this decision, since we don't know what contributions we will receive nor when.

[stked]

,

I like your mockup.

Ditto.

[rudy85]

About tracks, why not keep tracks for each character?

-Ice field (already in game): Penguin, Mr ice block
-Savannah: Elephant, GNU
-Jungle (already in game): Mozilla
-Aqua track (like in transparent tube): Puffy, Gooey
-Lake: Hexley, Adium
-Clouds: Pidgin
-Castle: Nolok
-Fir forest: Wilber

I had the same Idea this is the work I started to make create character/world animation scene,
http://vimeo.com/user1575328/videos
It will be easier with character animation's work I already made ( now many charcters could be animated out of his kart )

It's an important point of making character wiki : Make characters and kart separated (problem exist for Audacity)

[Dakal]

Another image, i think it will make a better wallpaper than a background (too dark). I'm still searching a good idea for backgrounds.

EDIT: i made some coloured versions.

[Auria]

Hi Dakal,

I like the look of the images, but I have a couple concern :
1) there is a STK logo in the center of the screen. However, most of the time, the center of the screen is (partially) occupied by widgets. For instance on the title screen, the STK logo would appear within the icons. Same thing on the karts menu, or the tracks menu. I'm not sure this is a good idea
2) the sides are dark, the center is light; this means that dark text will be visible on the middle but not on sides, and that bright text will be visible on the sides but not in the middle. This might make things complicated
3) We must think of various screen sizes (square, 4:3, wide-screen, panoramic, etc...) How would your screens appear in wider screen sizes? If we add black borders on left and right sides, it will look strange IMO. If we scale the image and cut top and bottom, then it will also look strange :/

[Dakal]

Merry Christmas! and congratulations for your release.

Time is really missing with work, family, ...
But i make a nitro-gauge. if you think it's good i'll make empty and full gauge for the game.

nitro gauge

jauge.png (69.28 KiB) Viewed 15309 times

[Auria]

Hi Dakal,

I like the gauge
Now I'm not sure how well it fits with the speedometer but it's certainly better than what we have at this point, so I personally vote for inclusion

[Dakal]

Here the gauge and a new concept of speedometer but it's not really done yet. I want to make buttons, like a red light for reverse gear and other things.