PLEASE RIGHT CLICK, VIEW, AND ZOOM IN ON THE PICTURES FOR THE FULL SIZE BEFORE COMMENTING! And try to imagine them without minor JPEG compression. Thanks.
The main menu. The singleplayer, help, and exit buttons are all in their normal states. The multiplayer button is currently being hovered over, and the settings button is being pressed. The white sun logo in the back will be slowly spinning around. The font used throughout the project is Candara. The background is a nice screenshot taken by someone, I'll get into what I think should ideally be in the background later.
The menu you get when you click on the singleplayer button. If a mod doesn't have a campaign or tutorial, the button will be disabled, like here with the Tutorial button. The current mod/game is displayed in the bottom right corner.
The offline skirmish page. Mousing over the minimap will show the map description in a tooltip. Clicking on the minimap will open a large map panel (the next image) where you can edit start points and change the map. The "Change Map" button will do the same, but automatically open the maplist (the last image). The start place markers are numbered and color coded, and they glow green if on your side, and red if agaisnt you. "Download Maps" will show a conformation window asking if opening your web browser is ok, then link to jobjol or something. Maybe it will just open SpringDownloader. Everything else should be pretty self explanatory.
The map panel that loads when you click on the minimap. It contains some useful helptext off to the side. The "Change Map" button shows a maplist. The blue orbs are start point "magnets", think Springlobby. That blue bar I just noticed above team 1's start point is a mere figment of your imagination, please ignore it.
The map panel with the maplist open. Includes a scrollbar and a blue scroller (Which is not a figment of your imagination this time).
That's pretty much what I have so far. My thoughts on effects are as follows. Transitions between menus should all be done with a smooth fading out and fading in, not all the way to black, just so the background is the only thing left. I don't imagine there being much in the way of animation besides the spinning sun, but I think that's fine. Buttons will all have 3 varients, normal, highlighted with the mouse, and pressed. Tabs will have two, on and off.
Now, backgrounds. I've though of three possibilities. 1; A random assortment of nice screenshots included with the enabled mod. Loadscreens, basically. Nothing new. 2; An into movie showing some action and explosions with nice looping capability. I'm not inclined towards this idea because either it will be short and have really low quality, or take up a ginormous amount of space. Or 3; My personal choice, a real time rendered battle using the engine itself in the background. Think C&C Generals, but less fancy. You know what I think is worth a try? Spawn a bunch of random combat units, separate them into two teams. Send them at each other. When one is destroyed, spawn a new unit for the same team. Live, visually appealing action without a huge filesize. In theory.
Now on to goals, I'll be happy with this project if I manage any of the following things:
A: Create a fully functional GUI and implement it into Spring.exe
Not likely. I can navigate my way around a mod no problem, but know little of the inner workings of the Spring engine. I have no C++ knowledge and virtually no coding experience.
B: Create a fully functional GUI and implement it into a separate executable
Again, not likely. But more so then the previous. Game Maker 8.0 would be perfect, since it supports alpha channels, but its still in beta and won't allow any distributing of anything made with it.
C: Create a fully functional GUI and release as many resources and docs as possible to allow someone else to implement it as painlessly as possible.
This would be my grand dream for the project, but I realize that implementing an entire GUI is no short order to ask of someone. Still, I hope against the odds that someone can take the time and do this. I intend to leave this project with more then a few mockups, but release every resource Ive made including all the buttons, tabs, thingamabobs and their highlighted and pressed varieties in a nice, organized package. I'll include the mockups to show how it should all be put together, as well as some instructions on how I made the buttons and etc, and some documentation to my grand designs. But if all else fails...
D: Create something that someone in the community, be them developer, modder, or artist, can use for somehow improving their project or the spring engine.
Hey, there's going to be a lot of buttons and titles and stuff. Somebody's bound to find a use for something in my resource package, right? I mean, all IceXuick left was a single jpg of an ingame UI mockup, and we managed to get IceUI out of it, right? Sure it ain't perfect, but it's a great proof of concept. I just hope someone can do something out of all this, that's all.
Sorry about the wall of text. That should be it for now. Comments and constructive criticism is always welcome, trolling and flaming is frowned upon. Hope you all like what you see.
More to come, I hope.
