SF: Blowing off the Dust, GUI tools
So, having discussed the stunted development of Space Fortress, I realized that maybe I should give it another go. I dug up the old code, and I realized a few other little things that frustrated my progress. The first was the GUI.
Space Fortress is full of elements which are more conveniently displayed as text in a traditional GUI. There are so many elements that I don’t think I could have gotten away with a quick HUD. Maybe that’s bad design, but I should be able to finish badly designed games before attempting to polish turds.
I call this HUD not GUI
There are two parts of the GUI, one I am rolling myself (clicks interacting directly onto the rendered game scene, for selecting units and ordering them), and the other which is for the windows floating above it all telling you more than you need to know. I call the windowy one the ‘GUI’, despite any interaction with a graphical game would happen in the GUI. I call the other stuff HUD, I need better terms.
This is the stuff I call GUI
A little over a year ago, I chose SUI, a lightweight GUI package for Slick. It looked good and worked well, but was still in a bit of an alpha stage of development. As I blew the dust off of the old Space Fortress code, I realized that this lib hadn’t progressed since I left it almost a year ago. I don’t like depending on a lib if it isn’t being updated anymore, unless it’s scratching every itch already.
So a new one I’m trying out is called Thingle based on existing tech, brought to Slick by the unstoppable hero of Java Game Development, Kev. This ones seems to be a more extensive, skinnable wrap of Swing (I might be wrong, but it has the standard widgets), but fancies an XML widget layout tool. Great!
Sadly, before I play with the new lib, and (hopefully) decide to integrate it, there is a lot of slop in my existing code I have to tidy up. I could tell where I was so interested in prototyping something, that I did something the wrong way leaving a comment informing future-me that it was inelegant. There is also a design issue to sort out, too. The issue of tile-versus-pixel based movement. I will discuss that another day.
Retrospectively, these posts are likely boring unless you’re me. I think I can do better. Even by promising to add figures to the dry posts. Kids like animated GIFs!
3 Responses to “SF: Blowing off the Dust, GUI tools”
No, no, it’s good. I’m still designing that cyberpunk game in my head. I think if I ever get around to it, I’ll use it as an opportunity to learn Objective-C and core animation (”fuck Windows”).
…I wonder if there’s a PHP-Cocoa bridge.
… “No, no, it’s good”
Referers to “Retrospectively, these posts are likely boring unless you’re me”.
Retrospectively, I should have said “No, no, they’re good”.
Thanks Jamie! Also, I’m glad the cyberpunk thing lives on, conceptually.
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