Useing DesktopX to make GC2 Screens Scale.
Designing the Galactic Civilizat
| Designing the Galactic Civilizations 2
User Interface. Part 1: |
I have been wanting to do a weekly blog on the progress of the Galactic
Civilizations 2 user interface. Unfortunately I seem to have missed the
first 12 weeks of it, so I will have to go back and cover some of the
milestones of its design as time allows.
One thing that is going to make things nice in Galactic Civilizations 2
is that the game and UI will be able to stretch to whatever resolution
you want. How is it going to do this you ask? The major things that
helps us do these screens is that I am using
DesktopX Pro to
design them. This should be an article unto itself so I won't go into it
now, but lets just say is saves me hundreds of man-hours. And allows for
some really incredible stuff. One of which is the subject of today's
article.
How we are using
DesktopX to make our UI scaleable.
The last few days I have spent on our new planet management screen.
This is going to be very cool in the game, but as for how it works and
why I will have to leave that to Brad and the other coders. Myself, I
just have to make it look good. This is one of the most complicated
screens in the game, and is presenting a challenge when trying to make
it scale.
(Please note this screen is not done and may not reflect the what will
be in the final game.)
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Here we have the planet screen as it
appears in its
DesktopX form:
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Here is how it looks in the game at this
point at the standard screen size of 1024x768.
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Now as you can see this all works out fine as long as we are running a
standard resolution, but what happens when I am running on my laptop at
1440 x 900, or my desktop and I want to get more real estate and run
1280 x 1024, or even 1600 x 1200. The good new is in GalCiv2 you can run
at other resolutions and we wont just stretch the graphics. All the
screens will scale properly, and you will get more useable space. Lets
see an example.
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Here we have the screen at a common
widescreen resolution of 1280x768
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And here we have the screen at the
strange resolution of 1024x1024.
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The only limitation to the sizing of the screens at this point is that
you can't run below 1024x768. In theory though I don't have such a
monitor, you could run this on a 30" LCD at 3400x1600 and it would work
like a champ. Providing your video card could handle it.
How are we doing this you ask? Well its quite simple in fact, thanks to
DesktopX.
DesktopX
supports scripting of objects. I do some of this when I am skinning, but
I am no great scripter. Thankfully I don't need to be for this. In each
of the objects that needs to be repositioned on a screen size change I
insert a simple script. Most of the time it is only 1 or 2 lines of
basic math.
Sample One:
Object.Bottom = Object.Parent.Object.Height - 208
Object.Right = Object.Parent.Object.Width - 127
Here is something a bit fancier, But still simple:
Object.Width = ((Object.Parent.Object.Width
- 160) / 3) - 20
Object.Right = (Object.Parent.Object.Width) - ((Object.Parent.Object.Width
- 160) / 3) - 15
Cari has written up a tool that takes our
DesktopX pack,
including its scripts, and creates the in-game screens. This allows the
artist or designer of the screen to handle all the scaling, and saves
our programmers for doing the much more difficult and complicated things
that make the game more fun.
I will try and write something more detailed about how
DesktopX helps
us make these screen as soon as possible. |