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Leyah Renegade
Live Musician
Join date: 2 Nov 2006
Posts: 125
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02-21-2008 11:09
Hi folks!
I'm getting ready to design my first HUD, and although I'm a good scripter, I could use some pointers regarding best practices for the actual interface design. That is... ways to show/hide different menus, come up with textures that load fast, etc.
I am thinking the best approach is to have a one big texture with all the relevant text and just change the offset to change text? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. I want it to be really easy to use, readable, non intrusive, and load fast.
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Chosen Few
Alpha Channel Slave
Join date: 16 Jan 2004
Posts: 7,496
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02-21-2008 13:04
My biggest pet peeve with HUD's is when they're bigger than they appear, because they're chock full of unnecessary transparency. That can really be a pain, as it interferes with building. You try to click on an object, but you end up clicking on the HUD instead. Make it very plain where the HUD surface starts and stops.
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Brandi Lane
Registered User
Join date: 2 Apr 2007
Posts: 157
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02-21-2008 14:03
From: Chosen Few My biggest pet peeve with HUD's is when they're bigger than they appear, because they're chock full of unnecessary transparency. That can really be a pain, as it interferes with building. You try to click on an object, but you end up clicking on the HUD instead. Make it very plain where the HUD surface starts and stops. *laughs* Oh I SOOO agree with that. Twice now I have ruined my XCite hud by accidentlally dropping a texture on it's invisible part. I haven't done any fancy huds myself, but in theory, you could achieve similar effect by rotating the hud to present different (and differently sized) sides. |
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Leyah Renegade
Live Musician
Join date: 2 Nov 2006
Posts: 125
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02-21-2008 17:50
Oh that's a good point! I'd been considering making portions of the interface invisible to hide stuff, but I can see where that's a bad idea. I like the idea of rotating the HUD and giving it differently sized faces. I will probably only need two face sizes so would be easy to do a 90 degree rotation to accomplish this. Thanks, I'm already very glad I started this thread, and hopefully it will deter other HUD designers from doing something annoying like this in future!  |
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Osgeld Barmy
Registered User
Join date: 22 Mar 2005
Posts: 3,336
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02-21-2008 19:48
you can make 6 different "windows" complete with a special effect (heh) by using a cube and scripting it to flip around to different sides
also if your hud is somewhat flat in 3d you can make it min and max like windows by fliping the button face to an edge, ie look at the front of a dvd case, then look at the edge
point is, eventho you view it as a 2d menu its really a 3d object, subject to all the same things as any other prim
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