Sunday, December 21, 2008

Menus!

The new menu framework I worte earlier on this year and talked a lot about at the time is going to finally put in a public appearance in the next release. I've been sitting on this for a long time, so it's well overdue.

I had ported a part of it to the interim working engine I had earlier on this week, and now I'm bringing it across for real, taking the opportunity to tidy it up even further.

What this means is that menus will no longer have the "traditional Quake" look and feel; but on reflection, the old menus were very clunky and awkward; obviously thrown together very quickly and a bit sloppy.

They were awkward to work with as a developer too, even the simple task of adding a new item to the options menu was a bit messy (especially if you wanted to drop it in the middle of the list). This is going to let me easily and quickly expose many options to players, often with just a single line of code (adding a cvar-based option).

Right now I'm stuck in the middle of scrollboxes; messy to code but something that only needs to be done once, thankfully.

The initial objective is to get the original menus ported across before I add anything new, so don't be holding out hopes for maps/demos/games/etc just yet!

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