Just a quick post today. I’ve finally settled on a UI design for MMORPG Tycoon 2 which I think will do everything that I want. I’ve started on implementing it, but it’s not far enough along to bear having a screengrab taken, yet.
I’m going to be using a vaguely MMORPG-ish UI; two floating panels at the top of the screen; one at the top left giving the vital stats of your MMORPG (name, cash, subscribers, etc), and a second one will appear just to its right when you have anything selected. The second panel will display the name of the thing you have selected, a few vital statistics about that thing (for example, if you’ve selected a character, it would show their class and health. Buildings would show their type and how many visitors they’ve had today, etc), and will also provide a clickable button to bring up detailed information and customisable settings about that object.
In addition, there will be a button bar along the bottom center of the screen, which will provide your basic building, design-setting, and report-checking functionality.
In terms of new code today, you may have noticed from my twitter feed, but I spent an awful lot of time implementing a new type of UI panel today, which when appearing would transition onto the screen in a rather complicated and interesting way.. which turned out to be extremely ugly, once it was implemented and debugged. So I’m a bit disappointed about that wasted development time. Maybe I’ll find a different use for that code later, so it won’t turn out to be a total loss. On a more positive note, I fixed the behaviour of the cursor moving over water today. In videos you may have seen how the arrow seemed to stretch strangely, when focused on water; that’s because the tip of the arrow was pointing at the sea floor (though drawing in front of the water), and the rest of the arrow was being pushed up above the level of the water, which gave it a very strange, downward-stretched tip when moving over water.
Tomorrow, I’m hoping to finish up the basic top GUI panes that I mentioned above, and finish a basic “expanded info pane” for at least a couple of types of objects.
