Weekly 03/04/05

Information icons and dxpacks.

I got two big things done this week. First, the information icon system. This system will be used to notify the user of events that require their attention. Eventually, we'll probably have some filtering options so that you don't get bombarded with event info. That's all in the future now. Here's a screen of the system working...

The icons drop from the top and fade in as they come down. You can activate it by left clicking on it, or dismiss it by right clicking on it.

The other major thing I did this week is less noticeable, but still pretty cool. Since we develop the UI using DesktopX, we decided to integrate the DesktopX objects directly into GalCiv2. This has 2 advantages. The first, each screen or window is a neat little DesktopX object with its own graphics and layout information. The other advantage is that users who have DesktopX installed can "skin" the UI or make modifications to it. Within reason that is. But you could make a minimalistic UI, have some gaudy graphics, or even move stuff around. Do whatever you want. Maybe even share the skins just like Windowblinds skins. That's neat.

Here are some screens showing off the differences. In the first screen, the UI is made up of 434 individual files that we had to manage. In the second screen, we've converted the 434 individual files to 50 DesktopX objects that can be loaded and edited individually.