May 8, 2013

UI work in progress

Hey!

I though you may enjoy some work in progress screenshots as well as global steps. I'm currently creating the UI of the Zone vision and... can't stop smiling at those simple lines. :)

As I'm cleaning the code, this is no more possible to spawn structures... It will be reimplemented soon with the brand new UI. Here we go :

This is the base layout (don't pay attention to the totally spurious resolution). From left to right, we have 3 buttons to get to the panels : diplomacy, freight and research. In the center, 2 buttons are bigger. The left one is for building, the right one is for destroying (yes, you'll have to destroy structures to avoid wasting resources!). And the 3 right ones are vision buttons : galaxy, sector and region.

The base bar contains natural resources stored in the zone warehouse. In fact, this bar is the visible part of the iceberg. By clicking on a button (which is not here yet) or by typing a top secret hotkey (not defined yet), the warehouse opens and will show advanced informations :
As the content is not ready, the size may not be accurate but the idea is here. Those informations are not important all the time so hiding them in some kind of sheet under the UI was a nice idea (I guess).


The build and destroy menu opens a vertical list of actions. The build menu shows the list of available blueprints for construction. The next step is not coded yet but additionnal informations will be shown on the right side of the buttons (price, description, customization, etc...)


The destroy button shows 2 possible actions : blast or disassemble.
By blasting a structure, it will be instantly (almost) destroy it, leaving ashes and few materials. Disassembling it will take time but more resources will be gathered back.

This is all I have to show for now. What do you think about it?

May 2, 2013

Texturing vs 3D details

I wasn't very involved the past days weeks. I had to work on another game project and also do things i never did before. And everything new to you is very tiring... The new routines are on the road. There is still a lot of work to do but it will be usefull for Alone in Space in the future so... That's not a time waste!

As I could enhance my 3D skills recently, I was adding more and more details to my 3D models. More and more faces for better rendering. Things like my last spaceship. But hey, I have to create 3D models for buildings, and there will be a lot of them. So If I continue to add details, the game will be unplayable because of big lags due to excessive details.

So I though about how I could get betters visuals without adding details. The answer is simple : textures and shaders. Up to now, I was using plain textures on faces. That's nice but huh... May be too much simplistic. Working on textures is the first step.

The guinea pig for this experimentation was the Command Center. I restarted something weeks ago but that was crappy. I started from 0 and here is the model without textures :



That's really simple. There is a lot of faces as it is a half sphere like shape, but the overall structure is quite simple. From this, I worked on texturing it to add details. Here is the result :



That's very interesting and also satisfying : not a lot of polygon, but still a nice looking structure. I'll have to gather more detail textures so this will be quite hard (I only use free textures for now).

Hard but not impossible.