[GD-Design] Game UI's

[<ham...@tm...>]

> 
> 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