[Help-liquidwar6] Re: Liquid War 6

[Christian Mauduit]

Hi Timothy,

I follow the discussion on the main LW6 discussion list, the subject might
interest others.

For information, we were discussing about possible graphical contributions
to the game, and I outlined that what is probably most needed now was a
good "score screen" and a "tactical hud".

On Tue, June 30, 2009 10:57 pm, Timothy Anderson wrote:
>> The one thing which would be cool now is to have some way to
>> display the winner/looser (you see the way LW5 did that, the three
>> "tubes"?), and possibly a "hud" which would display the current army
>> levels, time left, network bandwidth, well, a very fancy & complete hud.
>> If you're interested, tell me, I can explain more.
>
> Definitely. Let me know what you're thinking.

About the hud, I'm thinking on something which can:

1) be "colorized", the way the menus in LW6 actually pick up colors from
the map automatically. This allows some kind of automatic
ambiance-control. I realized it was too time-consuming, if at all
possible, to anticipate all map-creators wishes. Maybe in a corporate game
it's possible to define one ambiance once for all, but it happens Free
Software games just don't work that way. You always end up with the best
idea for a level coming very late, just after you've designed everything
else. So this "colorizable" stuff is very important. In practice 2 "color
couples" are available for the hud. A "color couple" is just a foreground
+ a background color. They are named "text" and "frame". Frame has a wider
appreciation than in a web application, it's for anything that isn't text,
if something must be texturized, it will be done using this. It's the
responsability of the map designer to pick-up colors with enough contrast
for these. So well, the hud should be drawable in 4 colors (2*2), can have
textures if needed, but keep in mind those will probably need to adopt
some random colors, on which the map designer and the player have the
ultimate decision.

2) be stretchable, there's just no notion of a fixed resolution in LW6,
one should be able to resize the hud in any way. So it's necessary to
think in terms of percentage rather than absolute pixels. Vectorial spirit
;)

3) leave a rectangular place to display the map (seems obvious, but...).
This place can have pretty much any shape, the map will adapt itself, but
keep in mind there's a bunch of 4x3 maps over here, it's quite a de-facto
standard, so something near this is just very convenient.

4) display the following informations :
- time left
- player name, color, frags, IP address, "ping"
- teams (that is, colors) with the associated players (here's there's a
representation problem for which I haven't any ideal solution, one team
(color) can have several players) and their "health" (number of players)
- bandwidth (network traffic up/down)
- a chat box (*very* important)

About the "score display", I just have no precise idea. The "colorizable"
and resizable aspects apply to, but for the rest, no idea.

Have a nice day,

Christian.

-- 
Christian Mauduit <address@hidden> - http://www.ufoot.org/ ___ __/\__
Liquid War 6 - http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/     / _")\~ \~/
"Les amis de la vérité sont ceux qui la cherchent et non _/ /   /_ o_\
ceux qui se vantent de l'avoir trouvée" - Condorcet     (__/      \/