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Old fonts, new fonts

Name:	Geom
Date Posted:	Jan 02, 2008
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Lately I've been giving a cosmetic makeover to Orcs vs. Martians' menus and guis, with particular emphasis on re-fonting things. Here's the old Game Setup screen:

It was functional, but looked too much like Microsoft Excel. I want this to look like a game, not a spreadsheet!

Here's the new version:

Ta-da!

My next mission is to get this gui to resize to different resolutions, in a way that looks halfway-decent...

BTW, thanks to everyone who gave feedback from the OVM Beta! The comments have really helped me get a clearer idea of what to focus on as well as giving me some new ideas! They've really helped me out.

In case anyone missed it, I resourced OVM's tab gui control, and it's over here. Ron Nelson was also nice enough to post a port of it for TGEA, and that's over here.

Recent Blog Posts

List:	01/02/08 - Old fonts, new fonts 11/29/07 - Tab Control WIP 11/11/07 - OVM Beta1 test! 07/11/07 - Orcs vs. Martians 05/31/07 - work on programmatic DTS billboards 02/14/07 - Recoloring DTS shapes 01/24/07 - Orcs vs. Martians alpha 09/14/06 - It's starting to look like a game

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Novack (Jan 04, 2008 at 01:08 GMT)

Haha! good work on the fonst Geom, it really makes the difference. Keep up the good work!

Pesto126 (Jan 05, 2008 at 18:24 GMT)

not bad.. but can you do some 3d'ish look to the buttons? How are they being drawn.. in game or via .pngs outside of TGE... you could use some drop shadowing and rounding, etc.

Geom (Jan 05, 2008 at 20:32 GMT)

@Novack thanks! I've got it re-sizing now too, but it doesn't look so good at higher resolutions. At 1600x1200 the labels seem tiny inside the buttons, I wonder how other games solve this problem...?

@Pesto what kind of 3-d look are you thinking of? Like more Mac-like?

Geom (Jan 05, 2008 at 20:38 GMT)

The grey buttons are all GuiPopUpMenuCtrls, so their backgrounds are all rendered with the standard dgl stuff .

I did modify them tho to render a .png inside them.

Wolf Dreamer (Jan 28, 2008 at 19:28 GMT)

A first time player might see the cool shadowy figure with the question mark on him, and think it a different faction to try out. Orc, Martian, Human, or the Mysterious Shadowmen. You'll never know what form they'll choose to take.

Pictures instead of words makes it easier to spot things, and will make it easier for someone who speaks another language to be able to figure things out and manage it. So be you German, Korean, or Martian, you won't have any trouble joining in the game.

Perhaps where it says trees, have a picture of a tree, and the menu won't say Some, Plenty, Insane Amount, or whatever you have now, but have instead one picture of a tree, four trees, 10, or whatever, to indicate how treey that level is.

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