UWindow 2 Development Blog

[CvP]

UT2k4 menu system was actually quiet good. so no need for uwindows on that.
but UT3 is entirely different case.
even UT2k4 style menu for UT3 will be great.

btw, good luck solid snake

[UndeadRoadkill]

Very awesome indeed. I think if this thread starts to get an overwhelming response that epic might start to feel a little stupid for how they went about it this time.

I highly doubt that, more like it will reinforce their idea that they can release whatever lackluster thing they want, and the users will run with it, and do all the extra work for them.

But either way, nice work Snake, I hope you succeed in freeing us from the evil default UI!

[WrATH]

Uwindow for UT3 would be awesome, can't wait for you to finish this, great work.

[RoadKillGrill]

Thank you for trying to make UT3 better, the addition of a Uwindows (or ANY better attempt at a UI) is appreciated.

[Henrik]

For people who don't know what a UWindow is:

http://www.to-center.net/index.php?o...111&Itemid=152

Kind of overtechnical for the average person. I like uWindow(s) because it goes a long way to making it feel like the original game, but also it is a lot more functional and less irritating to navigate.

I'd like to see the in game chat, map vote etc redone as part of this, hope that is fairly easy to do. Would be great if it solved the fps problem during chatting while maps stream.. in fact I'd laugh because thusfar Epic has been unwilling or unable to...

[Hedge-o-Matic]

I'd be interested in making a theme for this (Necris, of course!), if you release the info required to skin or re-theme it.

[xTwist~of~Lemonx]

I'd be interested in making a theme for this (Necris, of course!), if you release the info required to skin or re-theme it.

A man after my own heart. That'd be awesome.

[CaptainZap]

Epic? Are you listening??

[btcomm]

Solid snake, how close do you think you are coming to actually getting a working beta? just currious

[Solid Snake]

also it is a lot more functional and less irritating to navigate.

The major goal of UWindow is to have good functionality, and to allow customizing of that functionality. Just because I don't mind a drop down menu system to acess various parts of the game does not mean that other people don't mind.

I'd like to see the in game chat, map vote etc redone as part of this, hope that is fairly easy to do.

Unsure about this, mainly because this package could be detected as a foreign package thus possible a cheat package by servers.

if you release the info required to skin or re-theme it.

If I find an easy way to do it, then I shall release information regarding it.

Solid snake, how close do you think you are coming to actually getting a working beta? just currious

It's difficult to say. It is working right now, but thus far you can't do anything with it, because I'm still writing the core stuff. It's sort of like wondering when you can start to drive a car before its been designed. Things like buttons aren't even implemented yet. UWindow2 and any form of a UI is a complicated design project. It needs to fast and reasonably intuitive but it also needs to be extensible ... which can make it quite difficult to design from a code aspect.


Project Log - 12/01/08

Tonight's project goals were to mainly clean up the code base and rewrite several portions of it. Continous iteration is the only way to achieve good quality code. So, I'll list what I did today. No screenshots as no actual extra development has been done from a visual standpoint. This is more interesting for people who just like to know the workflow of things.

• Rewrote UW_Component's methods to change its position. This was mainly a lot of grunt code, where I had to simply write out lots of methods to alter the position and size of the component for both relative and actual measurements.
• Incoporated rules about position and size dependent on parents. UW_Components can exist in another UW_Component as a child component. Imagine a window full of stuff, such as a drop down list. The drop down list is a child to the window, and the list is a child to the drop down list. When you move the window, you expect the drop down list to move too.
• Wrote the position bounding system. Sometimes you want windows or other components to stay within areas of the screen. As in you may want to have a child popup window that always stays within its parents window.
• Changed a few 'for' iterators to 'foreach' iterators as this is faster.
• Found a better way to detect the starting resolution of the game. I used to check for this per frame, but now I detect it when the game starts up, and I make the necessary adjustments when UWindow receives a call to change the resolution.
• Found another method to boost FPS again. I turned off rendering of the scene completely.

That's about it for tonight. I'll probably wake up the next day, and have to rewrite some of that code. I coded some things pretty quickly, and also documentated what I wrote in some bad English. Will review it when I'm not so tired methinks!

[RoadKillGrill]

Good job keep it up .

[S.H.O.K.K.]

hi there!

any news!? can't wait for that!

[Solid Snake]

Project Blog - 15/01/07

Well, it has been a few days since my last update. It was mainly a period of refactoring the code that was there and getting it to run faster and testing some new methods out. This unfortunately leads to the almost non ending cycle of think, design, prototype, implement, unit test cycle. These cycles take time, and they aren't so much about trying to add as many features as possible, but rather than improve the existing feature set already there. Anyways, I spent the majority of time overlooking the way components were handling various properties. Previously I was using a struct which would contain different variable definitions. But this was getting annoying to handle after a while. So I winded up writing it as an array + enum setup. This makes it a lot eaier for me to code. Like all good things, this took a while to finish writing.



As you can see there are still some bugs with the system. The pink boxes represent the actual boundries of the windows. Its possible to do a few things right now.

• Its possible to actually shrink the image below the actual boundries.
• When minimizing / maximizing the windows the inside images don't properly adjust their left and top positions.
• You can't see it in this image here, but it looks like I screwed up the way I implemented focus switching of windows. As in, you click on a window that is hidden and the stack is organized oddly. I know why, I implemented another method to reorder the topology but I didn't test it throughly enough.

So before I continue, it is best I fix these bugs. However, the new system now starts to allow child components and handles them ok for the most part. This means I can actually start to write some actual functionality into the interface. Oh and I imported and added UT2004's menu music.

[Al]

Nice job Snake!

[Magwa]

Awesome job,i used to get my butt kicked by this guy in UT...wow Uwindows tyhanks for taking the time to do this for the community...