Gui Fun

Its kind of a roundabout route that I came to be playing with the skills gui. Basically, I was thinking about a dialogue system. Now, in the tradition of games like KOTOR, I want certain dialogue options to be based around your characters persuasion/bluff/intimidate skills.

Now, thats fine, but it meant I needed to add a persuasion skill to my skills DB. Not a problem, except that I also have to update my skills gui, which looked like this :



I'd taken the time to set it all out nicely, but now, adding in a new skill, I needed to go shuffle things around. Again, not too much effort, but since the skill system is very much a prototype at the moment, it could get annoying having to do this anytime I change things. So really, I need something dynamic.

Hmm. Ok, so, in that vein, I thought about just using a text list, like I had in my inventory and spellbook :



Yeah, I could certainly do that easily. Thing is, I like having the little skill increase and decrease buttons directly next to the skill. Come to think of it, I want pretty icons next to them. So, although a skill list is certainly fine for a prototype, I decided to try implement something using a nifty gui control I'd discovered earier : guiStackControl.

This sucker does exactly as the name says...it stacks gui controls. So any children controls get stacked, one on top of the other. The nice thing here being that the children can be, for instance, guiBitmapcontrols, having their own buttons and whatnot.

So if you put the guiStackControl in a guiScrollcontrol you can get something like this ;) :



I should add that there is one other step, and that is dynamically creating and deleting the buttons. Basically, I made a single button in the gui, set up the spacing how I liked it etc, and called it base_button. Then, when the skills panel wakes, it selects all the players skills from the DB and creates a new button inheriting the base buttons property, but replacing the icon and text to something appropriate to that skill, then adds them to the stack control. Easy, and it works perfectly. :D


Now, I suppose this post is pretty arb overall, I've written about my joy at using a simple guiControl, lol, more experienced Torquers might be smiling at this. But when I first saw it, the possibilities didn't immediately jump out at me, so I thought I would share. If your RPG is based on using your skills to increase them, you could have skill progress bars on each "button", ala Oblivion. Neat :).

I'm going to alter my other list type things to use this. Its much nicer to see icons in your inventory than just a big text list.

He, well, thats it. Not much for a post, I know, but I'm trying to keep up the "weekly post" thing again. I will get more time this weekend, so hopefully I will make more significant progress.

Oh yes, and here is the radar I modelled, the one I talked about in my previous post. Odd though it is, I still enjoyed creating it and seeing it in engine :