Saturday, March 07, 2009

Platini said my game rocks. Allegedly.

Today, I started work on a new GUI system. As much as I like the original FryGUI, there are a few features that I'd like to support that, whilst possible to implement in the existing code, would require enough rewrites and redesigns that I'd be as well starting afresh.

I'm sticking with the Screens and Panels system which works well, and adding support for things that I think really ought to be there. Chief among these is multiple resolution support. Instead of sticking rigidly to an intial res, the interface will scale appropriately when altered by resizing the panels and gadgets appropriately. Fonts might get bigger, tables might get more info visible on-screen at once, and so forth.

The other major inclusion is joypad control. I'm making a football game, the joypad will be the primary method of control during a match, so it's pretty important that I can navigate screens using it rather than have to reach for the mouse every time I fancy making a substitution. Navigation using Tab or the cursor keys will also be supported.

Other additions include allowing individual screens to reposition panels, more flexibility regarding skins (previously, skin border details etc. were hard coded, I never did get around to making them editable), positioning gadgets using reference points rather than hard coordinates (e.g. BOTTOM_RIGHT for the bottom right of a panel, regardless of size), animated gadgets, improved tables and better text input (with clipboard support, or at least that's the plan).

Meanwhile, Michel Platini was in the stands as Newry City (my home town team) lost to Portadown last weekend. The footballing world is certainly a strange place.


Anonymous said...

Just letting you know that someone still reads this.


Anonymous said...

That makes two of us, then.
Long ago, in a galaxy far away, I started working on a little game called Football Career - back in 2002.
I kinda shifted the platforms, but I am still an avid football fan and I would really like to code more these days - especially on a footy game.

So, I am really interested in your progress, since I worked on my own GUI - never happy with how the ugly butt controls looked in a footy manager game.

Anonymous said...

Not only do people still read it, but we're expecting results in the new future.


Scaremonger said...

Looking forward to seeing FryGUI#2...