GUI content

[StefanP.MUC]

This topic is for discussing the contents of the GUI (not the layout or technical aspects).

What do we have?

• Gold, Mana, Territory counters
• Minimap area
• log box (how exactly should it be used in later dev states?)
• Tab box with now cleaned up structure

And now the question: what do we need and want?

[Skorpio]

We need a chat box and icons for spells, traps, rooms, creatures, system menu. An area for fighting creatures like in DK1 would be nice. Was there something similar in DK2 or did they change it?

[StefanP.MUC]

I created a basic empty button for Rooms, Traps, etc. See attachment. It's 50x50 and has some "shaded" borders. It can be used for designing the actual button icons. We also need a "Pushed", a "Hover" and a "Disabled" state.

What about its colors, its borders?

Color-independent Ideas for the not-normal states:
Hover: make the normal button lighter, "glowing"?
Pushed: make the normal button darker, or only darker on one side?
Disabled: gray shaded normal button

For the tabs I suggest, not using "nested" tabs (tabs in tabs). Removing one row gives a lot more space to design the menu and for the user more overview.

basic button idea

buttonbase.png (378 Bytes) Viewed 11747 times

[charlie]

I really liked the notification stack that was in DK1 where new notifications 'dropped' down the side of the LHS panel and you could deal with them in order. It would be a nice touch to replicate that feature.

[StefanP.MUC]

Yeah, some kind of notification system is needed to. But I think this has to be created in the source code, because these buttons would have to be created at runtime.

About the tabs:
In my latest gui version I dropped all the sub-tabs (like "basic" and "advanced" as childs of Rooms). This gives A LOT mor overview, space and looks more polished. The effect of different groups can easily be achieved if we do all the basic rooms in row one and all advanced rooms in row two, for example.

[svenskmand]

I really liked the notification stack that was in DK1 where new notifications 'dropped' down the side of the LHS panel and you could deal with them in order. It would be a nice touch to replicate that feature.

I also think that was very nice, we should keep that.

I would like to volunteer for making icons. But before we can make them we need to know what they are for. We currently have not settled on any spells or traps. We can make creature icons as we have creatures, and also some of the room icons.

I liked the stencil-like icons from DK2, any opinions about that?

[StefanP.MUC]

Yeah, the DK2 Buttons are good. But the for example the Glest buttons also. I think we shouldn't worry too much about the "details in detail" (;)) currently. With a basic concept and a basic button (what we already have) it's not much work to adjust colors and borders later on.

I created some experimental hover, push and disabled buttons, here they are.

[svenskmand]

Here is another button, I just added the OD logo to show how the symbols could look.

[StefanP.MUC]

Nice. This doesn't looks bad.
Well, it's the same to me, which buttons we take for a start. We should first redo the buttons that already work (the four rooms + host) so that the new GUI can be added to the official source as soon as possible.

[StefanP.MUC]

Testing your buttons on my latest GUI design, I came to the decission that yours are fitting pretty good. Can you create some basic, empty buttons with the following effects?
Normal, Pushed, Hovered, Disable

[svenskmand]

Yes I will do that when I get home tonight

[StefanP.MUC]

Cool

By the way, do you think 50x50 is good? They shouldn't be smaller, but could be a bit larger if we wanted. But they shouldn't exceed 70x70 (that's really big).

[Skorpio]

I'd prefer to use the old parchment texture for the buttons, I mean something like this:

Button.png (64.22 KiB) Viewed 11658 times

Here's a test image with some spell icons:

[StefanP.MUC]

Where is this from? Or did you just draw them?

[Skorpio]

Those are some icons I made awhile ago.

[svenskmand]

I vote for non-parchment, I think the GUI should be made of metal, and look mechanical. Also what type of icons do we go for? 1) Stencil look, 2) cartoonish color icons, 3) something else?

[Bodsda]

I really like the mockups that Skorpio has put up.

Bodsda

[svenskmand]

I meant for the icons, not the borders.

[Bodsda]

The icons should be self explanatory, I hate games that give you a million and one different icons with weird names that mean absolutely nothing. With the three above, I can easily guess what the first two do, and I would say the third is probably a gas attack.

Bodsda

[svenskmand]

The icons should be self explanatory, I hate games that give you a million and one different icons with weird names that mean absolutely nothing. With the three above, I can easily guess what the first two do, and I would say the third is probably a gas attack.

Bodsda

Yes they should of course be self-explanatory, but the above lack consistency, they should have a uniform style to them.

Actually the DK2 icons did exactly that, they where self-explanatory and very consistent in their look.

[StefanP.MUC]

I'm really unsure on this one. Skorpios basic style looks great, but I'm not sure if it fits the games "deep, dark and dangerous" style. Maybe we shoudl use them as a basis and change their color scheme to some sort of "silverish".

[oln]

I agree. I don't think skorpios button background feels right for the game. Maybe a colour chage would be enough though.

[charlie]

I vote for non-parchment, I think the GUI should be made of metal, and look mechanical. Also what type of icons do we go for? 1) Stencil look, 2) cartoonish color icons, 3) something else?

That sounds like steam punk. This is dungeon-based. Dungeons... stone... GUI should be brown, dingy, stone-like.

[TheAncientGoat]

Personally, I like these: http://opengameart.org/content/moderna- ... -interface and http://opengameart.org/content/gui-for-some-rpg-game

There's a lot of elements we can use on OGA otherwise, a good place to look is here http://opengameart.org/browse-menu/images/37/10

[StefanP.MUC]

These look fine, but are for another project. Even if we took them for now, we will reach a point when we had to draw additional buttons that OGA don't provide. And I don't believe we'd hit exactly the same style. We should either find a set that holds all our needs or do it from scratch. Seeing svenskmands and Skorpios examples, I trust that that we will have very good buttons that all will have the same style.