On 28 January 2010 07:53, James Paige <[email protected]> wrote: > So I have been thinking about using slice collections (*) for menu > layouts, and I am thinking that some kind of GridSlice would be useful. > > The idea is that a gridslice is divided into even-sized rows and > columns. Children of the grid automatically get moved to fill the grid > squares. > > Suppose I want to reproduce the load game screen. I would create two > slice collections, one according to the "Load Game Screen" template and > one according to the "Load Game Info Panel" template. > > The Load Game Screen template would require a slices marked as > "sl_load_new_button" "sl_load_exit_button" and "sl_load_grid" (not sure > about the names, I am just making them up at the moment)
I assume these would not all be mandatory > The Load Game Info Panel would be fit into the grid slots in the other > collection. it would have slots for the hero pictures, current map, > current time, etc... > > ...actually, it would probably contain another grid for "Load Game Info > Panel Hero Previews" which would be automatically filled from another > slice collection that would allow walkabout, or battle or portrait > sprites, and maybe names and stats (but to reproduce the current load > screen it would just have the hero battle picture) > > Anyway, how do y'all like the idea of a slice grid? I think it would be > a nice alternative to painstakingly arranging lots of same-sized > container slices? (think of the master palette in the sprite editor > That would be hell to convert to slices with no GridSlice) > > * I like saying "slice collection" a heck of a lot better than I like > saying "screen layout". I am thinking of changing the name of the menu > in custom... > > --- > James Paige This GridSlice sounds like a good idea (although something big remains unexplained when going from "Children of the grid automatically get moved" to "The Load Game Info Panel would be fit into the grid slots") But I think that in the case of the load/save menus, would you would want is yet another type of new slice: a MenuSlice. Recall that we planned to increase the number of save slots on the load/save menu. MenuSlices can have an unlimited number of children, of which a limited number are displayed at once, in a grid. They might have scroll bars, and the order in which items are traversed is selectable (row major or column major). We could allow scrolling smoothly instead of in jumps. I think what really needs discussing is how to go from slice collections to replace builtin menus. Labelling slices to give them special meaning seems like a good idea, but I'm also envisioning 'protoslices' - (noneditable?) placeholder slices added to a slice collection which ingame are replaced by one or multiple slices - in your load menu, the grid slice might have one child marked "<Saved Game Panels>". Also, I was planning to add something like a 'View' or 'Clipping' slice, which clips the drawing of its children to a rectangular area, using view frames. Not sure if it's the most elegant solution, but it seems like a simplest way to enable drawing just part of a sprite or a mapslice. Split screen would be achieved by parenting slices for two different maps to two different view slices. But... how on earth would you show two parts of the same map at once? However, view frames can do more than just clipping. As well as drawing onto part of a frame (clipping to a part of the screen), we could also allow people to treat part of a frame as a sprite slice. But I don't really see any use for this ATM. _______________________________________________ Ohrrpgce mailing list [email protected] http://lists.motherhamster.org/listinfo.cgi/ohrrpgce-motherhamster.org
