RE: [GD-General] GUI Design

[Troy G. <Tr...@cs...>]

The only problem I have with percentages relates to this, but not directly.
The main issue to me is that a 0.0 -> 1.0 mapping in X and Y implies a 1:1
aspect ratio to the screen, *or* it implies non-square pixels (neither of
which is true). While this may not present any problems in a practical
sense, it would certainly present issues (as mentioned before) for
pixel-perfect kind of presentation.

I would do something along the lines of this: define the world as a 1024x768
screen. 1024 is the resolution of units in alot of packages (IIRC Flash
divides pixels into 1024 fractions for position vectors). 1024x768 is, I
would imagine, a *very* common display resolution for games (it's my current
favorite as a sweet spot between good resolution but not too high). And, it
represents the 4:3 aspect ratio that would be present in 640x480, 800x600,
1280x1024 (well, not exactly), 1600x1200... And, if you wanted to be really
cool, then you'd do a *separate* layout for 16x9 displays (or just float the
1024x768 horizontally centered with texturing to fill the sides).

In the case of tri-head stuff (or dual-head), I would recommend explicitly
checking for those situations and either supporting or not specifically. I
would *not* try to come up with a form of units that fits *all* cases,
because as mentioned below you'll get stretching (or you won't end up using
the screen real estate effectively).

That being said, are there any games out there that take advantage of
dual-monitor/dual-head/tri-head video cards? I know the ole Doom would allow
you to run up a network client on three different machines and each machine
could be linked for a panoramic view... it'd probably be just 0.01% of the
gaming population, but it'd certain be cool (imagine an RTS spanning threee
monitors...).

Troy
Developer Relations
Criterion Software
www.csl.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ray [mailto:ra...@gu...]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2003 7:54 PM
> To: gam...@li...
> Subject: Re: [GD-General] GUI Design
> 
> 
> Make sure you take window aspect into account.
> For example, if you're in parhelia triple-headed mode, your 
> aspect is really wide and you don't want things horribly stretched.
> 
> - Ray
> 
> Jason Maynard wrote:
> > Yeah I would recommend using values between 0.0 and 1.0 as 
> a percentage of
> > the width or height of the screen like you said, you can 
> convert to actual
> > screen coordinates by just multiplying the the screen width 
> or height then.
> > 
> > Another option is to design the GUI layout in a fixed 
> resolution and then to
> > convert them into a different resolution apply a scaling 
> factor.  Say you
> > have a point (x,y) in 640x480 layout and your screen is in 
> resolution WxH,
> > then to find the point (x',y') in screen space:
> > 
> > x' = x * (W / 640);
> > y' = y * (H / 480);
> > 
> > -Jason
> 
> 
> 
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