Tuesday, April 20, 2010

More on the HUD

I've decided to add the Quake 64 HUD as well. It was present in an officially released and approved version of Quake, so we must regard it as an official version of a Quake HUD that should be available, even if it doesn't get much love.

Both the QuakeWorld and the Quake 64 HUDs will be very slightly changed from the originals. I mentioned that I'm moving the armor/health/ammo icons to the right of the values, so that it's easier to visually associate the correct icon with it's value. I'm also spacing them out a little more. There seems to be a tendency with Quake to have everything rammed tightly up against one edge of the screen (and tightly up against each other), which I guess was required if you're running at 320x200. Being faithful to the original is great, but not when the original was crap, OK?

The classic status bar will stay completely unchanged, of course.

The way it's panning out it looks as though all of the HUD items may actually end up being user-configurable after all. I'm storing positions/etc in global arrays, but there's no reason why the contents of these couldn't be replaced with e.g. something read from a config file (COM_Parse format, natch). I'll talk more about that later, if I get to do it. It's definitely a cleaner proposition than the old cvar-based method.

2 comments:

said...

Something similar to this?
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/manoelkasimier/makaqu/light_3on.gif

In this HUD, the ammo values and weapon icons were kept separated because there's no strict relation between each ammo value and each ammo icon in several QC mods out there, and also because each one of these lists can be hidden individually:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/manoelkasimier/makaqu/menu_video.gif

As for the big ammo/health/armor icons, the numbers were kept closer to the center of the screen to be more quickly readable.

There's also a menu to define not only the distance of the HUD, menus and console text from the edges of the screen, but also the size and aspect of the 3D renderer display, which is helpful when playing the game in CRT TVs:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/manoelkasimier/makaqu/menu_screen.gif

mhquake said...

Yeah, it'll be quite similar. There's actually code in the QW source for handling the ammo/weapon separation, it's not elegant but it works.