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pakmannen

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Posts posted by pakmannen

  1. @Oddity: Not that bad, the overall layout is good, but the graphics are lacking. The borders are (dare I say it?) ugly, and the gears just looks like something that was embossed in photoshop. Personally I think your take on the clock theme (with the pulsating black edges and that) is way superiour to this. As I said, I do like the layout. It's very Da vinci. I don't think that's nessecarily thiefy though. The forest / city thing feels more thematic.

     

    @Sneaksie: How could you think the city/tree version was the options screen? Does anyone actually know what's going on here? This is the LOADING/STARTUP thread dammit.

     

    Seriously, if people don't know what they're talking about, it would be good if they read up before posting an opinion. Please?

     

    As far as the clock is concerned, that was not your idea Oddity, it was your screensaver. The idea came long before, it was even in early menu concepts. Clocktower. Remember?

     

    The reason for the clock being in the STARTUP screen was, as I stated when it first was presented, it being supposed to be our logo. You know, the one with the gear and the title across. The clock/title combo is a just a larger version of that, with a clock PLUS gears (you all saw the animated version of this concept some months back) to make it more interesting (and I think a clock is a logical thing to have in a loading screen but hey, that's just me)

     

    For clarity, I'll post the previous animated versions:

    Version 1 18megs (Yes, I suck at video compression)

     

    Edit - Damn, I see oddity has removed his version. Bah.

     

    Edit 2 - My opinion on clock hands tied to loading: I'm with Sneaksie here. Just let them spin around. I don't think they need to be tied to the actual loading.

  2. If it's only for the startup screen, there's no need for a clock or any animation.

    The startup screen is the only one that's visible for more than a few seconds (well at least on a decent computer) and as I said, it will also be the default mission loading screen, but the author should be able to easily replace (or if we go that way, modify) it.

     

    @Spring: How large is it?

  3. Yes, people people, read the title ok? This is the STARTUP screen we're talking about. It's still going to be the default mission loading screen as well, if the FM author doesn't override it. I see no reason why it shouldn't be a clock, since we're talking about TIME here (loading), not how much pressure there is in a tank.

     

    Can Gildoran confirm if you can rotate still images? I have yet to hear a good reason for using a 3D model over still images (or a roq video).

     

    @Spring: Did you manage to upload the psd yet?

  4. im not shure if images alone can be rotated, so far i have not seen that done in the guis, but a simple 2 poly

    .ase can, and its basicly the same thing, plus the benifit of it scaling proper will make it look better over

    standard gui image scaling which can be a bear to deal with.

    I'm pretty sure images (or window defs I think they are called, right?) can be rotated. At least I think that's what Gildoran did when he showed me an ingame menu, featuring the clock rotating.

  5. Okey, so animation works. Now, what are the advantages/disadvantages with:

    • Using an animated (md5..?) 3D model. How detailed can it get. Does it look out of place on a 2D parchment background etc. @Oddity: How much work are we looking at if we go this way?
    • Using GUI scripted "sprites" (for lack of a better term). I suppose a clock is pretty easy to animate this way, since it's all simple circlular rotations. This would mean, as far as I'm aware, to create a few gear pictures, some clock hands and just put them in the GUI.

  6. Yeah, the FPS drop is specific to loading screens, since there's a lot going on in the background.

    I guess it's not really worth it to remove this function, since I assume loading will be slower as a result? It's a bummer though, if we can't animate it. I guess you could still test how it performs with an animated model or GUI scripted animation.

     

    If we wont animate it, I see no reason to make the clock a 3D model. But say we find out we can animate it, and that we want a 3D model. How hard would it be to create something similar (and as detailed) as the placeholder we have now? (Guess this is directed at Oddity)

     

    (The clock hands designs are, by the by, available here if that's any help when creating a 3D model. Seems like the screensaver creators just googled "clock hands" and went for the first picture they saw..)

  7. as for the loading screen.. im not to shure if any type of animation will work there... seeing how the doom3

    loading screen works.. its just plain.. and you can see your fps drop and hover around 2 while it loads... im not

    shure if any type of animation can work. but a test will see if thats true or not.

    Didn't you check that out Gildoran? I remember I asked you that over IRC and you replied (after checking out some files) that the loading GUI works just like any GUI, so animation should be possible. True/false?

     

    Or is the FPS drop built in specially for the loading screen, since it loads a lot of data in the background etc?

  8. Alright, time to get back to these then I guess. First of all, Gildoran got this thing ingame a while back. He and Drumple needs to coordinate their efforts.

     

    Second of all, we need to finalize the concepts. I still say we start of with this one (the loading screen) and get it ingame before starting on the main screens (a lot more work).

     

    So what's still needed for the loading screen then?

     

    1. The background. I did some work on the trees but that's it. Spring, could you upload the PSD with your latest change (the house) so I can merge that in as well? We could look for a factory type building but honestly I think it's pretty good the way it is.

     

    2. The clock. We need our own original clock. First we need to know how it's going to be animated. Gildoran wanted all the pieces separate, gears, hands etc, and animate them with GUI code. Oddity wanted to model it :P and Napalm thought we should do still-frame animation. (Napalm is, by the by, not involved in this anymore. I haven't heard from him in months) This needs to be decided, and then the clock should be put together.

     

    3. The title. The original concept had the Dark Mod title over the clock. If we still want it, we need to decide exactly how it should look. I have a few examples, but I'm not too happy with them myself. I'll post them here tomorrow.

  9. *sigh*

     

    Check the sticky: Ambient Design Document

     

    We've got tons of machines/generators. We've got crickets. We've got wind sounds. We've got water/dock sounds. We've got electricity sounds. I even think we have a creaking wind sound which might work for you as a creaking sign.

     

    They're all in the darkmod_ambient_environmental soundshader.

  10. Also, you can't really put a padding on an image, since padding is the "inside" margin or however you should explain it. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.

     

    As to why your images are placed like that when you increase the margin: when you use float:left the images are placed after each other, until they don't "fit" in the element they are placed in no more, and the image that "don't fit" jumps down to the next row. I'm not too good with explaining, but hopefully you got that last one. :P

     

    However, that's no 10px that are causing it in your picture, so there's something fishy going on. But nevermind that, try the code in my previous post.

  11. No need to add any code, all you need to do is edit

    div#buttons img {
    margin:0 1em 0 1em;
    }

    Just increase the margins currently set to 1em to something larger.

     

    General advice: You don't need to add new div classes every time you want to do something. That code I quoted basically means: apply this style to every img tag found in the div with id "buttons".

  12. Oh, I thought these were the thing:

     

    div#hack_test{

    html>body div#hack_test{

     

    IE doesn't see the 2nd one.

    Hm, don't know if I would call that conditional elements though. Personally, I tend to use the term "selectors" for anything that specifies a certain element. The element > element selector is commonly known as child selectors I believe.

  13. You can put conditional elements in css files. I do it all the time. There are few layouts I use that both FF and IE render properly (IEs fault natch).

     

    Of course when I say conditional elements I mean bits that only IE can or cannot see (depending on the situtation).

     

    I say pah to last resorts. I build layouts with these IE quirks in mind. I think you have to.

    Wait.. By conditional comments I assume they were talking about:

    <!--[if IE]>
    <style>
    #content {height:100%}
    <![endif]-->

    You can't add those things to the css file as far as I know. Can you?

     

    @Spring: Did you try to replace the faulty margin with a padding instead?

  14. What exactly is it you're trying to do? Conditional elements are only supposed to be used as a last resort. (And they're annoying since you have to put css code in your html document, and thus update two files when you want to make a change)

     

    Margin is buggy in ie with floated elements yes, but padding is not, so if possible, try to replace whatever margin you want to change to a padding instead.

  15. Yeah, "margin:x x x x" and "padding/border whatever x x x x" are shortcuts. The order: top right bottom left.

     

    You don't have to use em, I just did it out of habit. :) You could code your page with px instead, since the other measures are done like that. Em is a dynamic unit, and 1em is equal to the current text-size. Confusing? :) In short, it's used when you want to create pages that scale well when the user changes his font-size in the browser. It doesn't make sense to use in your case though, so it's probably better to stick with pixels.

  16. Alright, I checked the code, and pretty much rewrote the whole thing.. :P Sorry about that. Anyway, I slimmed it down since you had a lot of unnecessary divs and tables and whatnot lying around.

     

    The problem was what I thought it was, different interpretations of the "float" property. My code should work in IE, Mozilla and Opera. Don't have Netscape installed so I guess you'll have to check that one.

     

    If you have any questions about the code or anything just ask.

    And here it is (you only need to download the html and the css file)

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