Objectives Display Gui

[Springheel]

That's what we're talking about though--implementation details.

 

If I'm reading what you're saying correctly, Ish, we would have the player select a mission from the main menu, that mission would then load a separate "GUI map" that contains the purchase screen, the objectives and the difficulty/playstyle. These would all be presented in a format that looks just like the main menu, so the player wouldn't be aware that this is a 'map'.

 

Then, once the player has settled on their options and selected 'start game', the actual mission is loaded?

 

The only snag I see there is that a loading screen would come up when the player went to check his options. I don't know if that's a huge problem but it might look odd to the player, who wouldn't understand why there was a delay going from one screen to the next. How long would it take to load a map with just guis in it?

[Ishtvan]

If I'm reading what you're saying correctly, Ish, we would have the player select a mission from the main menu, that mission would then load a separate "GUI map" that contains the purchase screen, the objectives and the difficulty/playstyle. These would all be presented in a format that looks just like the main menu, so the player wouldn't be aware that this is a 'map'.

 

That's one way of doing it, yeah, but now that I think about it, if we can load the data from the "GUI map", we can probably load it from the main menu too, assuming we can call new scriptfunctions and stuff from the main menu GUI. I think it would make more sense to try adding a pre-mission screen on to the main menu first, and keep the GUI-map idea as a backup if that doesn't work. It would be the next GUI to come up after you select a mission to load from the campaigns/mission screen, and it would call some scriptfunction to load the data for that mission.

 

I guess that would require another copy of the objectives GUI.

[Springheel]

I'll take a look at the objectives code and make sure there aren't any transitions or other time-based commands.

[Ishtvan]

I don't think there were, except maybe for page turning, don't recall how that was set up. Also, transitions to pull up / put down the GUI are actually okay, because we can do the transition, then call the script to stop time, and the reverse for starting and stopping. Although for objectives, maybe it's okay if they just pop up since we're not trying to put in any ingame explanation for them like the D3 PDA or antyhing. Unless our thief is carrying around a TODO list?

[Springheel]

Having a nice fade in/out effect is still good design, so I think we should do that. I've looked briefly at the gui, enough to see that I have to modify the graphics a bit, but not much more than that.

[Springheel]

Btw, do you think an animated texture would work while the screen was paused?

 

Ok, I've taken a closer look. It's hard for me to figure out, as there is a lot of hardcore scripting in there that is beyond me. There's also two different gui files, the objectives and the objectives_sdk. The latter is better organized and looks like it has everything the former has, but I can't be sure if one is just an updated version or what the story is.

 

I found only one time-based command (in objectives_sdk only) but I have no idea what it's for.

//Test for Usability-Off

/*

windowDef testgui_onoff {

onTime 1000 {

set "desktop::george" "1";

}

onTime 2000 {

set "desktop::george" "2";

}

onTime 3000 {

set "desktop::george" "3";

}

onTime 4000 {

set "desktop::george" "4";

}

onTime 5000 {

set "desktop::george" "0";

resettime 0;

}

[Ishtvan]

Oh, I think that timer thing was just a test to show objectives completing 1 by 1, basically objectives 1-5 each being completed every second. Since it's a diagnostic, we won't need it in the final versoin. I'm not sure, but I think objectives_sdk is the newer version.

 

I would hope animated textures would work, but am not sure. Videos work, but that might not mean anything since they're piped in externally.

[Springheel]

It's easy enough to test, I guess--I'll add the same swirly fog effect I've been using in the mission completed screens, and we can see if it works.

[Ishtvan]

Yeah, that would be easy to test. You could test it with g_stoptime 1 even, if you bind a key to do that, I think it will also work from within the GUI.