BA 9.00 Released!

[Floris]

Finally the moment is here. BA 9.00!

I finally got the possibility to add a lot of my own widgets and lots of customization too. The whole GUI has been restyled. This must be enough until BAR is ready. I know there are an insane amount of changes, we hope you like most of them.

Meanwhile... Decay has toned down the crazy LOS coloring that came bundled with Spring 100.

Note: This release has NO BALANCE CHANGES.

Changelog for 8.18 -> 9.00

Configurable widgets

• Healthbars now have a border around them. (toggle style with /healthbars_style) Bars for wrecks are smaller, decolored and only show when zoomed a bit more.
• Ally-cursors now show playernames next to them. (toggle with /allycursorplayername and /allycursorspecname)
• Added snow widget. Addes snow to maps using a snowy name. (toggles with /snow, and remembers setting per map)
• Added Smart Select widget. (default off) Selects units as you drag over them. (modifier keys: SHIFT: select all, Z: same type, SPACE: new idle units, CTRL: invert selection)
• LOS colors greyscaled + use ';' key to toggle between los / los+radar
• LOS view is enabled by default. If you dont like it - just disable widget "LOS View" (gfx_los_view.lua)

Others

• Rezzed units will get a small halo above them.
• Enemyspotter looks better and has increased performance.
• Commands FX, lines are now textures with V shaped arrows + glow at endpoint diminishes over time.
• Added Shadow quality manager: sets shadow quality max at start and lowers this when average fps gets lower and lower. (this widget wont enable shadows)
• BuildETA is slightly smaller.
• Units with self-d command show wit ha skull icon and countdown time.
• Units that were given to you will show a 'new' icon. Icon fades out gradually, unless they are out of sight, then the fadeout process starts over.
• Smooth camera widget is slightly faster in moving camera.
• Projectile lights are less bright now.
• Customformations got a more glowy endpoint texture
• Added highlight selected unit shader widget. Uses health colors. (default not enabled, wont render highlight for cloacked units)
• Added Xray shader widget. A modest version, shows more instense when zoomed out. (its based on ZK version, but I improved performance quitte significantly)
• Added anti ranges widget. Fades when zoomed in. Purple: anti being build. Red: building complete, 0 in stock. Orange: 1 in stock. Yellow: more than 2 in stock.
• Commander name tags: different name style. when zoomout stays large.
• Map Startbox: fixed jagged edges + Commander name tags styled names.
• Added mapmarks widget: draws growing circle at newly placed mapmarks. Erasing also shows a little ground-glow feedback.

GUI

• Rounded borders for all backgrounds.
• Uniticons were streched out a lot everywhere, now reduced that to nearly squared.
• All uniticons are re-processed with a small bevel and rounded corners.
• Added GUI shader: blurs background of various GUI elements. (disable widget to remove the blur, change its style with /guishader)
• Red UI completely restyled.
• Red UI build/order menu: only shows paginator when it is required, uses space to draw extra row of icons.
• Red UI fix: not able to move elements. in f5 (hidden gui mode)
• Red UI Energy/metal resource bars got a gradient applied. Also did this for order-menu toggle button 'leds'.
• Selected units bar restyled.
• Volume OSD has half as much bars and is restyled a bit.
• Added wind strength display. Shows average windspeed in bottom right.
• Comcounter: small style adjustment.
• Replaybuttons: restyled
• Added catchup (reconnect) status bar.
• Simplified energy conversion slider. Made slider draggable over the whole display.
• Console displays recent messages a lot longer (30sec). Console shows 6 lines but when pressed ctrl it will show 10.
• Ally resource bars got restyled. Also uses same player-order as the advplayerlist. Auto-scales with resolution.
• Advanced playerlist restyled. Doubleclick for camera tracking. Country flags! See if spectators using camera or move mouse. Improved res-slider bar responsiveness. Click to hide spectators Scale buttons + auto-scales with resolution.
• Added mapinfo at bottom left of the map, displaying mapname, author and description
• Initial queue: same style as new RedUI buildorder menu.
• Restyle keybind info display. The button will slide to the leftside at gamestart.
• Buildbar restyled.

Removed:

• Open Hosts widget
• Lockcamera UI

~ Floris, Decay

Download Here
http://springfiles.com/spring/games/bal ... ilation-52

[FabriceFABS]

Gooooooooooooooooooooooooood
Thannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnk
Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu


Glad you can do it inclued in BA finally...

[ShockWave]

This release it's awesome!

[albator]

Great !

Some comments about what is imo less good though:

- It would be more readable if the police of the resources bar could be increased to the size it used to be. Or is it configurable ? It is quite difficult to read at the moment. I guess it depend your screen resolution.
- Spectator list could be visible permanently by default when you are a spectator
- Spectator list should be made visible permanently as an option when you are a player
- when you are a spectator and you want to look at a player unit, you need to double click to the player list, then to double click again to get ride of the auto track of the mouse player. That is 4 click vs 1 before. Please add the eye back !

[RageQ]

muh gameplay issues

[klapmongool]

Apparently this: 'Rezzed units will get a small halo above them.' is visible without LOS or radar.

[Floris]

@ alba
The advplayerlist points are suggestions, will look at it later. (You can just select a unit of any player to see his resources already..)

I'dont understand what you mean by this:
- It would be more readable if the police of the resources bar could be increased to the size it used to be. Or is it configurable ? It is quite difficult to read at the moment. I guess it depend your screen resolution.

police? RedUI resource bars? Ally resource bars?

I assume ally resource bars... they are a little on the small side, and yes size is dependent on resolution. The smaller size is fine to see if you allies are out of resources or not. But you could share resources too via the bars, which i didnt realise or forgot about it. It might be better to use adv playerlist for that. So I'll take a look at it later but i m not sure what to do about it yet.


@ klap
It is known bug, will fix or remove it for next release which is probably today or tomorrow.

[albator]

@ alba
The advplayerlist points are suggestions, will look at it later. (You can just select a unit of any player to see his resources already..)

I'dont understand what you mean by this:
- It would be more readable if the police of the resources bar could be increased to the size it used to be. Or is it configurable ? It is quite difficult to read at the moment. I guess it depend your screen resolution.

police? RedUI resource bars? Ally resource bars?

I assume ally resource bars... they are a little on the small side, and yes size is dependent on resolution. The smaller size is fine to see if you allies are out of resources or not. But you could share resources too via the bars, which i didnt realise or forgot about it. It might be better to use adv playerlist for that. So I'll take a look at it later but i m not sure what to do about it yet.

My bad, I meant the font (police in french :p) of numbers displaying the quantity of resources of the player at the top of the screen (metal & energy), as well as the width of the player resources bar. Nothing from the ally resources bar (I agree with you on that actually)

It use to be much bigger and you kind of did not had to directly look at it to know how much you had.

[smoth]

why all the work with redui, bar is replacing it with chili I thought

[jamerlan]

why all the work with redui, bar is replacing it with chili I thought

ba and bar - 2 different games :)

[smoth]

BAR is/was meant to supplant BA. BA is NOT IP Free

[Floris]

OK so here is some clarification of how I vision my involvement.

@Smoth
Because we are (mainly) BA maintainers, not BAR developers. (though there is overlap)

BAR was always unofficially announched to be around the corner as in "maybe next year!". And thus BA was aging away, visually neglected from that point on.
The decision of keeping BAR development completely separate might have hurt BA(R) a bit. Implementing new things directly into BA gives me personally feedback and motivation to do that extra more work. Also ambitions with BAR grew, but not so much for the dev team availible workhours.

I started making small widgets as a user/player. Then I started doing some (small UI work) work for BAR. But at a certain point I stopped that as was requested by Bluestone, although he wasn't really in charge of BAR, that is Beherith and still is.)
Then I decided to release my widgets separately. This gave me extra motivation to polish and expand them more. Then in cooperation with decay I started seeing a reason to make some cosmetic edits in existing widgets. Because userbase was too small I decided to wrap things up and halt development. (decays widgetpack was loved, but userbase were really only a handfull). Then out of the blue, Bluestone resigned and asked Decay and me to takeover. I agreed, as long as it was just basically continuing what I already was doing, with little extra outside of that. Decay being in change of balance and release, me in the gfx area.

It's still a bit of a mess, we only have 1 official BAR developer with some helping people around, but there hasnt been an active dev for a year.

I'm not going to change that.