Game Design

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    • Game Design

      I have been building a framework for a game and I have encountered a few issues I would like to get opinions on.

      #1. I am building a basic GUI system and I would like to know if my screens and controls should be prerendered, built on the fly or a combination of both?
      #2. If I prerender a screen made up of components such as 4 corners and 1 vert and 1 horizontal, is this a good design?
      #3. My demo is going to be 3D but the screens outside the main game screen are in 2D so I am thinking about having a ScreenManager pass the screen to be rendered to the displaymanager, how does this sound?

      Thanks

    • RE: Game Design

      We need to know something more about your UI design before we can answer these questions.

      I'd suggest grabbing a screenshot from MobyGames from a game's UI you want to emulate, and we'll pick it apart and see if we can't figure out how they did it.
      Mr.Mike
      Author, Programmer, Brewer, Patriot

    • I second mikes response, can't answer that without a bit more info.

      A few bits of food for thought. With prerendered images for GUI gadgets you'll see problems if you have a large number of high res images in use, especially if it entails some sort of blending.

      In my experience, using basic and very small textures for "elements of your gadgets", such as gadget interior fill, gadget edges, and a texture based font system will save you work in the long run. This depends on the scale and need in your case however. But for advanced GUIs you're going to see alot better performance, and much lower work if you use a system that takes these basic elements and builds the gadgets itself. Also allows scaling them for free(as in beer) :). (Forgot to mention that if you use pre-renders, you have broken interfaces if you change images, or general scales of images. Try to save yourself that with whatever method you choose)

      The post was edited 1 time, last by Dev ().