[WMCoolmon]

Tiling is possible, although it'll take a little more work. Alpha blending is also possible, I think, depending on the file format used.

[Nuke]

i figure youd have to have 4 fixed sise points at the corners, plus 4 scalible sections that may be stretched or tiled

heres an example


areas in green will be fixed size images, areas in red will need to either tile or stretch. theres not much variation in them so it shouldnt even be noticable. this way windows may be scalable. this is about the minimum window size.

[kasperl]

I think Nuke has found a good way of doing the windows. You can even make the right/left borders mirrored, and the top/bottom ones angled 90 degrees, so you can do all the red bits with 1 image file.

Nuke, couldn't you make the top left green bit consist of 2 green bits and a red one? That way you can have the text in there as long or short as nessecary, and still only need 1 image for all windows.

[WMCoolmon]

Hmm, it'd be nice if the close/hide buttons were separate. That way the clickable area could automatically be calculated and, of course, the buttons can have individual highlight images.

How about this -
Upper right window border/upper left window border/upper middle border
Caption text background image - Goes on top of the above
Hide button
Close button

Left/right borders
Lower right window border/lower left window border/lower middle border

That's 11 images,  15 if you count the state images for the hide/close buttons. (I assume in hidden state, the bottom three images will just butt up under the caption and the left/right borders disappear entirely)

Edit: The only problem with using one border image for all the mid ones is if somebody wants to do an extruded border - in which case they'd have to be rotated the opposite direction to look right, and at least two images would be needed to simulate lighting. OTOH, I might be able to add a 'rotation' parameter so you could specify something like what you're saying.
How are you thinking of doing the background, Nuke?

[kasperl]

WMC: I'd say unless otherwise specified in the table, only one border file is used, rotated so the inside stays in. I really do think the top border could be using the same file as the lower and sides ones. If you do the caption modular, you won't need more then one image set for all windows.

This'll give you:
Border = 1 to 4 files
Lower corners = 1 to 2 files
Caption = 1 to 3 files (3 for modular, 1 for single. 1 would mean a seperate one for each windows)
Top right corner = 1 file
Buttons = 2 to 6 (6 counting states)
Total:
6 to 12, or 10 to 16, counting states.
If you add one tile for the background, this'll give you 7 images to a window, if you go minimum and don't do anything special for the states.

[Nuke]

well no, that would need to be a fixed size, else the tiling would be screwed. you could have a small and large titlebox kinda redundant but its better than the current system. as for mirroring, im not sure that would work either. because the image uses a bevel effect it would make visible lines at the joints. it could be done but it would only make the design time longer.

each element could have a base image titlebox.tga. this image could have siblings for different states, such as titlebox-inactive. for buttons you would have button-mouseover or button-clicked. you would also need masks to define hotspot's masks would work on a per image basis (baseimage-mask) any item with a mask is assumed to be a button. buttns need 3 states, normal, mouseover, and clicked. borders need only one image, buttons need like 4. alpha chanel will define the transparent parts of texture, and also would be used for alpha blending. id like to be able to assign different shades to different tiles via table (ex: $tile: 0'0'255 image.tga), any pixels that uses that color would be substituted for the tile.

[kasperl]

Nuke: Why can't you do the title box more or less the same way you did the whole image? Just make a monomere (if you remember your organic chem you'll get my drift), and two borders to terminate? You wouldn't be able to do very small steps, but if you make the monomere 10 pixels wide, you should be fine.

The less images required, the better. The more images possible, the better. Just make sure you don't NEED more then a dozen images for a window. Just to make the step to skinning easier.

[Nuke]

i could if you want a drab monotone titlebox

im thinking 17 files

2 for title box (active/inactive state, optional)
4 side borders
2 corners
2 buttons*3 states+mask
1 center maybey

[kasperl]

Well, as I said, the less files needed, the better. If you make a proper interface table, you could get aaway with using 10 files for ALL windows. If you allow somehow to replace all pixels of one colour with another colour, you could do state images even easier.
This would allow for a lot of skins to be made quickly and easily, making it less of a disaster to replace the entire interface. Which is good.

[Nuke]

of course i assume this is the standard window. any window in the game will use the same 17 files. if you want a larger window you could substitute the title bar for a larger one. splitting it up into 3 wouldnt be any worse than making 3 different sizes. also i could make the buttons scalable as well, so that you may put more than 2 there. id like the middle to be tile filled.

[WMCoolmon]

Any of the images can be scaled along one axis to fit. So if you had a big long title bar, it could be squished to form whatever size needed. That might not look so hot though.
Another thing: No hotspots, at least not right now. They might be nice to have, but it's too much work to be worth it for now. They also aren't really necessary IMHO, they'd just make things harder to press.

And a final note before I'm off to bed - some of the windows will be nonmoveable, or nonhideable, or noncloseable. For the latter two, I figure I'd just remove the appropriate button(s).

I doubt I'll be doing any pixel color replacement, that'd require a more fine knowledge of the texture system than I have atm and would discourage things like shadowing and such on buttons. If the skinner really does just need to replace one color, they can take the extra 10 seconds to pick a new color and use the fill tool in paint.

Text colors will be settable though.

[Turambar]

still crashes for me, like it did before, and it crashes such that i cant copy and paste the info, it just leaves that screen up there, frozen

fix please!

[Nuke]

while this is the current build thead il say it again here, im having problems getting the $tech model: feature to work, i can either get the model to display too big or not at all. all 3d icons generated for my stuff are zoomed to close, cutting out most of the ship/weapon. my best bet is that it has a problems with pcs created models.  i tried every trick in my big fat book of tricks and nothing worked.

as for the ui, i could probibly come up with a way to scale the title bar and implement new buttons, but it will require adding images for the upper corners, however buttons and titlebar will be optional. also witout the tile fill feature the center image will need to be scaled to fit. also the lack of hotspots will require me to redo the buttons a little so they dont have a rediculously large trigger area. the new style im thinking about would allow extra buttons to be placed anywhere around the border with a minumum of added artwork i think rather than a tile filled window i think using alpha would look cool as well. anyway it would require 8 border images plus images for buttons, titlebar, and any other extra buttons or features (status bar for example) you may want. it will also allow you to have different titlebar, button styles while maintaining a 3d shading. also come up with a list of different free floating button styles you want, radio buttons scollbars and such. ill attach an example of the new system as soon as i produce one.



ok, this system uses 4 corner images and four border images. note that in dark red you see the same image used twice, on either side of the optional status bar. this is to ilustrate that this way you can really add buttons or other features on pretty much any of the 4 borders while using a minimum of textures. the buttons may be arranged in any order, in any number or not at all. the titlebar may now scale and it souldnt look too abnormal with the metal texture. this is just an example, the final version will be as space effietient as possible.

[starfox]

I can't seem to get the secret feature to work. Pressing F3 in the main hall does absolutely nothing. Do I have to activate some tags or alter some tables to get it working ?

I am using OpenGL, I tried D3D too but it does nothing special either.

And there's more, just tried the triple primaries, third primary cannon is not working either, Do I have to "doctor" table files to get it right ?
BTW I can see the  third cannon on the weapon loadout screen and on the HUD display, but it does not fire. I can only hear this "gun is empty" sound.

I know FRED2 is little outdated and LITTLE broken at the moment, but is it supposed to detect three or more primaries mounted on fighters ?

[Nuke]

you have to be in the main hall for it to work. in game (~+backspace), it only works with the debug build. also make sure you are running the right build, all too often i download it, extract it, and forget to select it in the launcher, and run the game. the resul is i can never get the new features to work

[starfox]

OK. Problem solved, thanks a lot !. I thought main hall was the main screen of the whole game (the one where options, barracks and ready room are located.)

Still problem number two remains, Somehow I can't fire with more than tho primaries.

[Nuke]

yea some table editing is required, you could probibly just hack a mission to let you fly a shivan fighter.

[kasperl]

Nuke: That looks good, but in theory, all of the dark and light red bits could use one and the same file, and the blue corners too, right? The caption and status bar could even be the same file(s), by the looks of it.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they should be seperate files, but that if a mod would want to do interface art quickly, they could be the same image. This'll leave you with 4 files, assuming you make the end of the caption/status bars the same image mirrored, and all the sides/corners are rotated to fit.  You then only add the images for the buttons, which can go from 1 to 9, according to state and amount needed.

These requirements sound very nice, because it'll allow mods to be reallly quick with the skinning. Now, if you make a table to allow for seperate images for each of the regions as well, you'd get a best of both worlds situation, allowing one to make each image special, for a maximum of 20 files.

[starfox]

Just checked the secret feature, very neat indeed ! But then my o'l reliable decided to freeze completely, so I had to restart.

Any idea when this secret feature decides to show up in non-debug build, it's just because the missions are not working in debug so I have to cut back to windows and switch build if I like to watch the secret feature. (Gosh, is there any official name for it ?)

Oh yeaf, the afromentioned freeze happened at SF window.

[Solatar]

Sorry to intrude on the ub3r interface conversation.

Originally posted by WMCoolmon


White boxes:
Meh. Sorry if you said this in the other thread already, but is it D3D or OGL or both?

 

It only occurs in D3D. My game basically looks like crap in OGL though, and I really don't wanna go through that.