The new and improved options screen

Published on January 28, 2005 By CariElf In GalCiv Journals

Edit: this was last week's journal but it ended up under the wrong topic somehow. Well, last we were all hysterically busy getting ready for Brad's media tour, which went very well. This week we were breathing a little easier, but we were still doing some clean up because it became apparent last week that we were being a bit sloppy with handling our resources.

The most noticeable thing that I did this week was to get the new Options screen working the way it's supposed to work so that Joe could hook up his brand new sliders to control brightness, contrast, and ambient lighting on the starmap. We've had the graphic for awhile but I didn't have a chance to hook everything up yet. One of the things that was really bad about the options screen in Gal Civ 1 was that it was very hard to edit. If we had to add in a new option, we usually ended up having to edit the graphics, and the code was pretty inflexible too.

Since there are going to be a lot more things that we need to be able to turn on and off from the options screen with a 3D engine, and with all the expansions that we'll be doing, I knew that we were going to need to be able to adjust the screen easily without having to go in and fuss with the graphics every time. This is what we came up with: there are 4 tabs (we can always make more if necessary) and 3 columns which are listboxes. The options are placed dynamically in the columns, and we have little headers and dividers to subdivide the columns as well. If we do it right, you won't ever see any of the scrollbars.

In order to get this to work, I had to spend some time making listboxes handle variable sized entries and able to use filters. The filters will actually help us in a lot of our listboxes because we won't have to re-fill the list every time we want to filter something. So I think that the options screen looks a lot better than the GC1 options screen, and it should be a lot easier to edit in both code and graphics.

Here are some screenshots of the Options screen so far. It still needs some tweaking to look exactly right, but you can see that it has potential.

This is a screenshot of the game options tab, which will have all the options that you'll want easy access to when playing like Show Grid.

This is a screenshot of the audio/video settings tab.

Have a good weekend everyone!

Comments

Solitair

on Feb 05, 2005

Paul.

CariElf

on Feb 07, 2005

Yep.

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