Thursday, April 8, 2010

Status Bar and HUD styles in WinQuake

After what seems a long fight I finally got variable HUD styles working in my WinQuake build. All I need to do is finish up the Rogue and Hipnotic stuff and it's done.

This is quite neat and may be ported to DirectQ, although doing so would mean removing DirectQ's customizable HUD. On the other hand this is a lot simpler for the user to get to grips with.

There are basically 7 styles available, selectable via the "viewsize" cvar (it seemed to make sense to use that) or a slider option in the menu:

  • Full Status Bar and Inventory. This is the classic Quake status bar, corresponding to a viewsize of 90, empty regions at the bottom of the screen and all.
  • Full Status Bar without Inventory. This is the smaller Quake status bar showing Armour, Health and Ammo only. Empty regions here too.
  • Alpha overlay Status Bar and Inventory. This is similar to the DarkPlaces bar, with the back pictures getting a 50% alpha stipple (to keep things simpler for software rendering). No empty regions. This is the default with viewsize 100.
  • Alpha overlay Status Bar without Inventory. As above but with Armour, Health and Ammo only. No empty regions.
  • QuakeWorld style HUD and Inventory. This is the HUD from QuakeWorld with the items spaced out a little (just so they're not all bunched together at the edges of the screen). No empty regions. Viewsize 110.
  • QuakeWorld style HUD without Inventory. As above but with Armour, Health and Ammo only. No empty regions.
  • No Status Bar or HUD. No inventory. No empty regions. The very same as the old viewsize 120.
It's OK to change the behaviour of viewsize for an experimental engine like this one, but DirectQ will need something different, so I'm thinking a new cvar will be required if I do decide to use it.

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