PlaneShift
Development => PlaneShift Mods => Topic started by: Cherppow on March 31, 2005, 04:45:24 pm
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Greetings.
I\'ve finished the gui that has been under construction for few months now. It\'s by far the longest project I have done to PS. Being pretty brown and messy at parts (I\'m no Nanaki!), it still gives some variation to the original CB graphical user interface.
I was stupid enough to tamper some of the xml data. This lead into troubles whenever new updates came out; I had to check what had changed, and add those changes to my gui. And I\'ll have to keep doing this if I want to keep the gui working with any upcoming releases.
The packed file is over 14MB in size, so I won\'t be able to host it myself. Hopefully I\'ll find a way to upload it to ps-mc or similar.
VR gui lacks:
- Unique PS loading bg (splash17.jpg)
- Unique zodiac graphics (zodiacs.zip)
(sorry for multiple edits)
Edit:
I redid the money icons, as can be seen in the screenshots, but they are located in a zip file that also contains models that I\'m not going to recreate, so I can\'t distribute the money.zip as a part of the gui. However, I changed money icon path from releaselist.xml, so they\'re loaded from art/gui/ directory instead. This way I can leave the money.zip off, and still provide you the new money icons.
Here are few screenshots:
(http://users.tkk.fi/~vrantapu/PlaneShift/Screenshots/VR_gui_mainview.jpg)
Main windows.
(http://users.tkk.fi/~vrantapu/PlaneShift/Screenshots/VR_gui_shoppe.jpg)
Shopping.
(http://users.tkk.fi/~vrantapu/PlaneShift/Screenshots/VR_gui_charcreate.jpg)
Creating a character.
(http://users.tkk.fi/~vrantapu/PlaneShift/Screenshots/VR_gui_inventory.jpg)
Old inventory.
(http://users.tkk.fi/~vrantapu/PlaneShift/Screenshots/VR_gui_inventory2.jpg)
New inventory & info window.
The inventory and infowindow were given some updates.
I did some more testing and increased compatibility with 800x600 resolution. Now both 1024x768 and 800x600 work quite well, though there are some bugs that I was not able to get rid of. Please see \'known_issues\' in the readme file for more details.
Here is the \'readme\'-file for it:
http://users.tkk.fi/~vrantapu/PlaneShift/Diagnostics/VR_gui_readme.xml
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I love it! All that woodgrain gives it a warm inviting feeling. Good work. :)
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Wow. That looks wonderful!
I recomend uploading it to http//:http://www.yousendit.com and then sharing the link here and let a few people host it on local FTPs. I REALLY want to have a go at this. The interface just makes everything seem so rich and alive compared to the opaque default interface! :D
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8o
That\'s amazing! Definately worth your work. Is there any chance we could get the devs to accept this as a stardard? I really think people would go for it.
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Umm...I doubt it would get accepted as the default, but it rocks regardless.
In my highly un-biased oppinion I would recommend sending it to a ps-mc (http://www.ps-mc.com) admin to get it hosted there. I\'ll PM you my...I mean...an admin\'s email address. ;)
:emerald:
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That is gorgeous, Cherppow. We\'ll make sure Talad sees this and perhaps we can make a torrent out of it.
- Venge
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Would be nice to have secondary skins in the game :]
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quite wonderful cherppow, I like it, now to get it!
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That looks very nice Cherppow. I can see you put alot of work into it. I especially like all those little changes, the leaf highlight on the chat window, the different stance icons, the character market. The more I look at it, the more I find. Very impressive. Just from the screenshots, I think I like it better than the original. You need to submit that to ps-mc so I can try it out.
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I like it, too. In fact, it immediately made me think that it would be awesome to make a different gui for each race. This one, for instance, reminded me of the Dermorians, being all woody and naturey. It would be great to have, say, a rock one for Krans, etc. etc. Lots of work, I know but it\'s a nice dream.
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WOW! That is so good. I hope they do put it in!!!!
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It is wonderfull work but still i like the default gui more ;)
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Originally posted by Nikodemus
It is wonderfull work but still i like the default gui more ;)
You non-conformist, you. :P
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Beautiful work Cherppow, mayhap we\'ll be seeing more of the same in the future? :) I hope this encourages others to give it a try too!
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Woah. I\'ve got to get my hands on this and get my PS working again.
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I -adore- that rat in the corner by the Upload button, on the Paths Selection screen (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v74/karyuu/kaoani/Rockon.gif)
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dont mean to be a killjoy but i dont really think its any better than the current. The type of attack sction is very good artisticly but seems unclear of what is what. i havent been on ps recently though. even so, i think you are veeeery talented cherpow and would like to see more work from you in the future
edit:the veeeery isn\'t delibrately like that, its my dodgy keyboard.
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Hello and thanks everyone.
I guess we\'ll have to wait and see what the Sirs Vengeance and Talad decide about bit torrent possibility. After that ps-mc.com is my choice.
In my opinion, it\'s purpose is not to replace the current PlaneShift GUI, rather to give players variety to choose from and help maximize our fun. Also remember that these are just few jpgs from which it may be difficult to tell how well/poorly \'VR gui\' actually works.
To Burntleaf - Good point. The attack stance icons were originally larger, and you could see them more clearly. However, only after they were done, I realized that they\'re shrunk to fit in the info window, and this makes them all very similar. I added the colour variation to ease this, but in general, that is certainly one place where to improve.
Any comments welcome. :)
Edit: For those who want to try creating own GUIs, I\'ve created a list of all PS backdrop, gui and button graphics, and wrote short explanations of where in the game they\'re used. http://users.tkk.fi/~vrantapu/PlaneShift/Diagnostics/files.xml
In addition, I made \"_Source gui\". This may first seem like a joke, but in a matter of fact, it is quite useful.
Here is an example screenie:
(http://users.tkk.fi/~vrantapu/PlaneShift/Screenshots/_Source_gui_charcreate.jpg)
It\'s extremely messy gui, whose sole purpose is to help in creation of guis. Its backdrop files have boxes showing where the text labels and other objects are located, so you don\'t have to check it by joining many times*. I addition, it shows the file names on the objects, so when you see something that you want to change, you know what file to edit.
* Note that these boxes are only in correct positions when original PS xml data is used. If you\'ve changed them xmls you\'re on your own. ;)
_Source gui takes only 2MB space, it\'s still too big to fit under my homepage, but certainly transferable through email or irc dcc. Or maybe the ps-mc.com wants it? :)
Remember that it\'s cool to change just some little things (eg. a scrollbar!). Have fun! :)
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Looks like it belongs in a game, hard to tell it wasn\'t drawn professionally. If it isn\'t buggy, I wouldn\'t mind using it.
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*Stands paralized with mouth open*8o
Amazing. It adds a new dimension almost, a new different feel. I love it and can only hope that you will continue this superb work.
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Great work cherppow, i hope devs add an ingame option to choose amongst different GUIs, so fans can creat GUIs.
Well devs have more important things to do but you\'r GUI is igniting something like this.
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I really like it it gave me the Idea that perhaps we could have a different gui for each race. That one would work great for an elf. I may see if i can\'t make a nice stone like one that would have a \"kran\" feel to it. Or a nice aquatic one for the Krylos, maby even a fire theme for the Dabioli :P
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Very nice. :diamond:
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Originally posted by Phinehas
I like it, too. In fact, it immediately made me think that it would be awesome to make a different gui for each race. This one, for instance, reminded me of the Dermorians, being all woody and naturey. It would be great to have, say, a rock one for Krans, etc. etc. Lots of work, I know but it\'s a nice dream.
Originally posted by SocratesDemise
I really like it it gave me the Idea that perhaps we could have a different gui for each race. That one would work great for an elf. I may see if i can\'t make a nice stone like one that would have a \"kran\" feel to it. Or a nice aquatic one for the Krylos, maby even a fire theme for the Dabioli
Idea thief.
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Wow - it looks quite impressive, and I look forward to trying it out when I return home from my time away.
It would be really nice to see a variable GUI system in which you could either choose a GUI, or have one defined for your race (as mentioned above).
However, I wouldn\'t classify it as massively important - it would be nice. I think I would vote for \'choose your GUI\', because then you wouldn\'t NEED to have one for each race, and you wouldn\'t be put off playing a race just because it\'s related GUI isn\'t that great.
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VR gui is now available for download on www.ps-mc.com (http://www.ps-mc.com). Many thanks to Cherppow for letting us host it, and also mad props to him for finishing it!
:emerald:
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Greetings,
and thanks everyone.
To Lyrah - Thank you. I\'ve been trying to filter out bugs, but one man can only test so much. Let\'s hope that no critical bugs have slipped through my grasp.
To Kwip - Thanks! One reason of why I didn\'t change the main loading backdrop was that I didn\'t want to make it look completely different. Now when you enter the game, you have a familiar feeling. :)
To DivineLight - Aye, a switcher would be good, since people have different tastes. There are players that don\'t like brown woody things, and they should not be forced to use such. Or they might get sad and go play Sony PS instead. ;) A thing that I would like to see is a gui editor program. Much like there is an effect editor, there could be a gui editor, that would allow you to eg. slide and stretch the widgets to positions you like. This would encourage more players to give it a try and minimize the time needed. Of course, as you said, the devs are busy, and this is not their priority.
To Phinehas and Socrates Demise - An unique gui for each race would indeed be great. Many commercial games actually use this, and it helps keep the game interesting in the long run. The guis would have to be very good quality though, and not some \'backyard contraption\' like mine. ;) This is my first try at gui modification, after all.
To lynx_lupo - Thank you. I miss the crystals, I hope we haven\'t seen the last of them!
To Telumehtar - Aye, a player could either use the race-preset guis, or select one of his own liking... I wonder how this gui choosing could be integrated into the game setting. Buying a new gui/part of gui? Quest related guis: One could get a whole new window of options after completing a certain quests? Experience related guis? Job related guis? Guild guis? Somebody shut me up.
I made some more testing before sending it to ps-mc, mainly in the lower resolutions. It should now work with 640*480 resolution too, though there are more scrollbars and few cosmetic bugs, that I couldn\'t fix without messing the layout in other resolutions. The total file count is 200 and size a bit over 14MB.
Please see VR_gui_readme.xml (http://users.tkk.fi/~vrantapu/PlaneShift/Diagnostics/VR_gui_readme.xml) for more details. Also any questions are welcome here in this thread.
Thanks to PlaneShift Modding Community (http://www.ps-mc.com) for hosting VR gui for me. As ArcaneFalcon said, VR gui is now available for download.
Sorry to keep you waiting. Have fun!
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Simply put: AMAZING
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Plane Shift Modding Community? GREAT!
So the Laanx wheel of Wishes is out of the game for supporting fan artists?
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Hello.
To DivineLight: In LWW people have to host their files themselves, so it would still have left me with the problem of where to upload it. I agree that LWW is a great site, and I miss the times when it was used more actively.
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We at ps-mc.com take what we can get :)
I haven\'t seen any activity on lww in ages, and arcanefalcon approached Cherppow before whoever runs lww did (would that be orogor?)
Long story short, we got da gui :D
Unfortunately, we\'ve been having some issues with the domain ps-mc.com (i.e. Nefron lost the registration info) so if you suddenly can\'t resolve the domain, try ps-mc.net (should be resolve-able by the time ps-mc.com is unregistered)
josePhoenix
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First of all: it\'s really, really good!
I\'m one of the people who don\'t like wooden brown things, and hence I won\'t use it, but this doesn\'t keep me from appreciating it. :tup:
Originally posted by Cherppow
To Telumehtar - Aye, a player could either use the race-preset guis, or select one of his own liking... I wonder how this gui choosing could be integrated into the game setting. Buying a new gui/part of gui? Quest related guis: One could get a whole new window of options after completing a certain quests? Experience related guis? Job related guis? Guild guis? Somebody shut me up.
I think this should not be integrated in the setting whatsoever.
Ths GUI is completely OOC, it is ony there to give you means of formulating your wishes and commands in ways the computer / engine can understand. The ideal GUI would be completely transparent and unnoticable. (\"transparent\" as in \"transparent proxy\", not as in \"invisible buttons\" ;) )
Therefore, the only purpose of making the GUI look like the game world is to make it less obvious to help it blend into the game.
On that note: is there any possibility to make the main info window less bulky? I find myself cursing it all the time, because it takes up so much space.
My suggestion is to make the bars separate from the attack buttons, and / or place them horizontally next to each other instead of vertically. That way, one could put them at the botom of the screen, instead of shifting the window halfway outside like I am doing now.
There is no reason to make the GUI depend on race / EXP / whatever, because they are totally independant from the GUI. The only thing would be differences in options due to gender and race, but these are things that don\'t go into the GUI, but into key bindings anyway.
I would absolutely hate to have a crippled GUI just because I have a newbie char. I always want the full set of options available to me at all times. The only thing that should be there is optional help dialogs, which, however, sould be easy to get rid of / reenable.
Don\'t get me wrong: I like the idea of having several GUI versions that are tailored to the races (like in StarCraft), but there IMO must not be a fixed dependancy. If I am a Nolthrir but prefer the Hammerwielder GUI, then that should be what I may select.
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Originally posted by Seytra
On that note: is there any possibility to make the main info window less bulky?
I agree and am going to combat this. I\'ve got plans for 2 gui\'s right now (whether I\'ll actually make both is up in the air). The one I really want to make is going to be heavily minimalistic, condensed, and designed for 1280+ resolutions. The window footprints would be greatly decreased and would help with your bulk comment. The other is a rip-off of the original EQ gui (which I realize many people wouldn\'t like, but I don\'t really care). I don\'t think the bulkiness would be a problem if the windows didn\'t automatically resize as you increased resolution (that would also make gui designing much easier), but they do. If you ask really nicely, though, I think I could work out making a mod to the original gui to decrease the info window footprint.
:emerald:
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Hi everyone!
To Seytra: Thank you. You have good points there too, even if I don\'t totally agree with them. I do agree that not all my previous ideas are good. It was rather my flow of imagination back there. However, I think that some of them might make a nice addition.
For example: after reaching a certain level in the skill of stealth, an indicator could appear on the GUI, explaining how well your character is currently hidden. Similar could happen with tracking skill; a small GUI addon could tell the player if there is a creature nearby, and how it was detected (later on even the direction). Players with low skill would have no use of such indicators, as their characters wouldn\'t be able to use them. Hmm, eg. in Final Fantasy 7, new GUI items are added to the menus/combat menus when the game proceeds, rather than sending a new player straight into the world with all the possibilities and no experience how to use them. This also helps to keep the players interested; one never knows what new possibilities may await.
In my opinion, a fully transparent/unnoticable GUI fits in fast paced FPS games, where you need very little info about your/target status, and maximum view area. Surely some of the same properties are also wanted in an RPG GUI, but with different priority, I think.
Info window: Aye, It\'s possible to make it smaller by editing infowindow.xml. About the \'bar orientation I\'m not sure, I\'ll have to test that. It\'s not possible to move the health and mana bar to different window (they don\'t refresh the amount). However, one could fake them to be in different window by using transparency on the info.png backdrop image. I first planned to make the info window triangular, so it wouldn\'t hide the view area so much, but dumped the idea as the actual window would still have remained rectangular, and it would have confused the player when moving and selecting different windows.
Just my thoughts. :)
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Originally posted by Cherppow
For example: after reaching a certain level in the skill of stealth, an indicator could appear on the GUI, explaining how well your character is currently hidden. Similar could happen with tracking skill; a small GUI addon could tell the player if there is a creature nearby, and how it was detected (later on even the direction). Players with low skill would have no use of such indicators, as their characters wouldn\'t be able to use them. Hmm, eg. in Final Fantasy 7, new GUI items are added to the menus/combat menus when the game proceeds, rather than sending a new player straight into the world with all the possibilities and no experience how to use them. This also helps to keep the players interested; one never knows what new possibilities may await.
Hmm... I agree that it is not necessarily a good idea to put up UI elements that don\'t serve a purpose. OTOH, the UI elements serve as landmarks and hints of what will be possible. I might never have thought of scouting without a tracker element on the screen, for example. I like to explore things, thus most of the time, I set things to \"advanced\" mode immediately.
OTOH again, there should be a minimal UI that gets the most common things done quickly without having to spend much time figuring out a forest of UI clutter.
So obviously, it\'s the time for implementing choice again, like in each window at least a \"minimal\" and \"full\" view. Ideally, the elements would be customisable like the toolbars in common word processors. However, PS can do without such nifty things for the near future, but it\'d IMO be good to keep the idea for future reference.
Originally posted by Cherppow
In my opinion, a fully transparent/unnoticable GUI fits in fast paced FPS games, where you need very little info about your/target status, and maximum view area. Surely some of the same properties are also wanted in an RPG GUI, but with different priority, I think.
By \"transparent / unnoticable\" I was not referring to visual functions, but to every aspect of the UI. Any UI needs to try to become as unnoticable and \"natural\" as possible, because the goal is not to work the UI, but to achieve another goal. In this case, acting within a virtual world.
Therefore, the UI must try to make this interaction as easy and powerful as possible. For lack of better words, ideally the UI would be a direct link to the user\'s mind, thereby eliminating the need for keyboard, mouse, screen, speakers, etc.. Obviously, this isn\'t yet possible, but that\'d be the perfect UI, since it\'d enable the user to just do what they want to do without having to formulate their wishes in a way that can be communicated to a computer.
So, it\'d be \"take sword\" instead of \"open inventory window, click sword icon, click hand icon, close inventory\".
The UI would be \"transparent\" and unnoticable, since it\'d be the same UI that our minds use to interact with the RL world (which by itself isn\'t really good, but that\'s another story).
Or take the task of changing songs in your favourite music player while playing PS. Ideally, you\'d just think \"play song XYZ\" and it\'d instantly play it, but in reality you must switch tasks to the player, sift through the playlist, doubleckick and then taskswitch back to PS. Nomatter how nice the UI looks, it still is a layer of abstraction that detracts from the efficient interaction with the underlying process, slowing down and complicating the achievement of the desireg goal.
Thus, all I am saying is that the UI must try to mimic the process it gives access to as closely as possible, not abstract from it.
That said, it wasn\'t really bashing your GUI, since it\'s not easily possile to substantially alter the way the game UI works. :)
Originally posted by Cherppow
Info window: (...) the actual window would still have remained rectangular, and it would have confused the player when moving and selecting different windows.
Exactly. That\'s what bugs me each time when I try to interact with an object that\'s in the upper screen behind the invisible main toolbar. Basically, the main toolbar would have to shrink to the size of the little arrow instead of remaining the size it was with the icons in it.
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Hellos.
To Seytra: I\'m not going into this \'mind link\'/perfect UI converstation. ;) But I agree that usability is the most important property in GUI. It should help users to interact with the world and not prevent them from doing so. I also agree that a GUI well done quickly becomes so natural to the user, that he/she barely notices it. Thus becoming \'invisible\'.