Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Mobius on December 22, 2020, 09:58:27 am
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I couldn't find any threads addressing the same topic, so let me know in case I missed them.
Command Briefings in FreeSpace 2 ensured the right balance between eyecandy (at least, by 1999 standards) and text, though they were leaning towards the former. Overall, they turned out to be a radical development over the older FS1-style CBs, which focused more on text. If you are wondering what Command Briefings looked like in FreeSpace 1, here's an example from the first mission:
(https://media.moddb.com/images/members/1/310/309249/Immagine.png)
It's worth noting however that with the redundancy of CB ANIs and CBs leaning more and more towards text content nowadays, the "wordy" part of the interface may be considered - on average - more important than it used to be, in terms of pure storytelling. I can't provide statistics on the matter but we have seen a switch from 2-3 liners to more text-rich CB stages used for all kinds of storytelling purposes, where the ANIs played a marginal role. I was thinking: is there any way to toggle FS1-style Command Briefings on a per mission basis, perhaps via a Mission Specs flag in FRED?
And that said, considering how similar FS1's CB interface is compared to the debriefing interface seen in both games of the series, I do wonder whether it could be possible, or not, to enable ANI (or PNG) support for debriefings as well.
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As far as I know, there is no code left over for this style of interface so it would need to be written completely from scratch.
It would probably be easier to get that into the new UI stuff since at least the command briefing part should only involve markup changes and no Lua code changes.
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When the new UI is complete, I intend to make an FS1 version of what I've already done for FS2.
If you're wondering what this looks like and how it works, download the UI Test Mod on Knossos. (https://fsnebula.org/mod/UITest)
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When the new UI is complete, I intend to make an FS1 version of what I've already done for FS2.
If you're wondering what this looks like and how it works, download the UI Test Mod on Knossos. (https://fsnebula.org/mod/UITest)
If you don't mind, I'd drop the screenshot you posted on Discord. It's very FS1-ish, if not better; who knows if it's possible to do something like that to debriefing stages.
(https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/223511363807346691/790977551039594506/screen0049.png?width=1043&height=586)
As far as I know, there is no code left over for this style of interface so it would need to be written completely from scratch.
It would probably be easier to get that into the new UI stuff since at least the command briefing part should only involve markup changes and no Lua code changes.
I'm no coder so I have no idea how to get this into FS2 (other than Mjn's UI). FS1 CBs however had the exact same format and interface as debriefings, except they added ANIs to the upper right corner of the screen. I don't know how hard would it be to "port" the debriefing code into Command Briefings, however.
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When the new UI is complete, I intend to make an FS1 version of what I've already done for FS2.
If you're wondering what this looks like and how it works, download the UI Test Mod on Knossos. (https://fsnebula.org/mod/UITest)
If you don't mind, I'd drop the screenshot you posted on Discord. It's very FS1-ish, if not better; who knows if it's possible to do something like that to debriefing stages.
We can edit all of the stages. It just takes time to get them all working. I suspect no one is going to be willing to alter the old interface code when we have this coming down the pipe. And with the new UI, the sky's the limit.
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For what it's worth, the icculus.org version has all of the old FS1 UI stuff working. In the majority of cases it required very little work to get the old UI functional again. For the command briefings it basically only needed new positions for things and the hotspots in the mask were a bit different.
Check the code here (https://git.icculus.org/?p=taylor/freespace2.git;a=blob;f=src/missionui/missioncmdbrief.cpp;h=bc80b0f995dd19665aa1d97fb19b27389017651b;hb=HEAD) and look for the MAKE_FS1 define's to see what changes were needed. FSO wouldn't have to deal with the changes for help text (FS1 doesn't support that) or the interface palette stuff. And of course the FS1 port in this case only does 640x480 res so you'd have to figure out the hi-res stuff yourself.