I've been thinking a lot about that recently, and the comment I wrote in the "interface and background" thread decided me to share the results of my brainstorming with you.
I don't like the current interface:
- it's too resource intensive, I'm pretty sure all the prblems many people have with it comes from there, and I guess the guilty part of the interface are all those ani files that clutter it.
- it's not mod friendly: all those anis, all those screens, they're just not easy to replace. Anis are a pain to do, and there's just countless of them
- it's not fast: too many screens just to reach a couple features.
First, I'd change the whole interface system:
rather than many screens, why not having a kind of webpage system? I may make pics to explain better if you don't think my idea sux, but for now, I'll just explain:
ok, you launch FS2, and arrive on the main screen. you have the usual background pic. On the right, you have a series of buttons:
on the top: choose pilot. clicking on it won't make a new screen appear, the right part of your screen will just show new informations, the pilots list, etc. all the buttons on the left remains visible, you just have "choose pilot" highlighted.
under choose pilot, you have choose campaign/missions. same deal, you have the list of campaigns and solo mission appearing. If a campaign is selected, its name will appear under the "choose campaign/mission" button. This feature should also load all the appropriate vp files used for that campaign, everything stored in a campaign folder
etc etc.
all the major commands, like "options" should be in that left main bar, and always available, wherever you are in the submenus. Say you click on "options". As usual, you'll have your display panel that appears ( in the frame on the right, this time ). To switch to the control panel, you have tabs on the top of the view, like in so many windows programs.
Then I'd get rid of ALL the ani. That's all that work that won't have to be done if a campaign maker wants his own custom interface, that will be much faster to load, etc etc.
To make the thing more customisable, I suppose a kind of "skin" could be loaded when you select a campaign.
There's no need for anis for, say, difficulty selection. Just select the difficulty level in a rolldown bar. It's the same for every features.
All that would make the interface much user friendly, really light on resources, and, if done well, would be as good looking as the current version. And it would be, as I said, much easier to modify ( a few PCX, a few colour codes, and you're done ).
That same system would be also carried on during a campaign.
You'd have a main window, with tabs to choose the different screens: a briefing tab, and a "hangar" tab ( coz I believe ship and weapon selection should be done on the same screen ). If there's a CB ani prior to that mission, another tab is available to go back to it if you want for some reason to see it again.
In the hagar screen, ships and weapons would be selected via rolldown menus, to get rid of all those tiny, uigly and ( you gotta admit, it often happens that if you didn't drop the weapon right in the middle of that big square, it would not be applied to the ship ) inaccurate ani icons.
edit: additionally, from a "legal" point of view, that removes all the copyrighted files and makes file sizes much lighter.
Voila, that's the basic idea. so?
