>
> Whilst toying with a simple RPG I've been working on in my spare time, I've
> run into a bit of a stumper when it comes to GUI design.
>
> Originally I started out with the grand notion that the GUI would simply be
> a bunch of overlapping windows on top of a 3D desktop (i.e. the entire
> background was the local "situation" -- first person, top down, isometric,
> whatever, point being that it's not constrained to a smaller window). This
> seemed to make intuitive sense.
>
> Until, of course, it was implemented. The control scheme is unbearable.
>
> Most games I've seen fall under one of three GUI camps:
>
> 1. effectively no GUI, the entire scene is 3D and interface elements tend
> to be non-interactive. Most first person shooters are like this.
>
> 2. hard coded GUI, where there's a display window and then a bunch of
> dressing that does things like show character stats, order units around,
> exit the game, bring up menus, etc. Most RPGs and some flight sims are
> like this.
>
> 3. MDI style multiple-window system with tiling and overlapping windows,
> where the 3D view is "just another window"
>
Please note that 3 can have an extra advantage, depending on precisely how much the implementation fits within the mores of whichever OS(es) it runs on: thanks especially to nVidia, an awful lot of "normal" games-playing people now have two or more monitors on their PC - it's no longer the preserve of professional graphic artists etc - and number 3 allows them to actually take advantage of that extra monitor, without the GUI designer having the headache of designing specifically for multi-monitor.
Straw poll indicates that many people running mulit-mointor have different size monitors and/or different max resolutions (usually they run their current monitor and whichever mointor they had before that, which was sitting on a shelf gathering dust until they bought a GeForce xxx MX/etc). In these cases, allowing the user to resize the available sub-windows to fit their own personal uniquely weird shaped desktop is fantastic.
[confession: I tend to get really pi**ed off when a game with loads of dialogues refuses to play nice with multi monitor - I've got the hardware, I got it working under windows/X11/whatever, and its extremely frustrating not to be bale to use it].
Adam M
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