Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
15
HUDs in Virtual Environments
Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.
—
Steve Wozniak
15.1 WHAT ARE HUDS?
Not surprisingly, HUDs or heads-up displays are made from the same stuff that makes up the rest of your
virtual world: prims and meshes, textures, and scripts. They are custom concoctions of shapes, colors, tex-
tures, and scripting that are created by content makers to help you access the functionality of their virtual
products or to provide game-playing devices like tools, weapons, or counters. Instead of wearing a HUD on
your avatar or walking your avatar into a HUD, you attach it to your screen. The HUD will occupy part of
your computer's screen space in the position you choose until you decide to detach it. Let's explore how a
HUD attaches itself to your screen by using a simple cube.
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Follow these steps, illustrated in Figure 15.1, to see how a cube will align as a HUD to your screen:
1. Rez a cube on the ground and name it Test_HUD.
2. As you know, every cube has six faces. Change face 4 to a red color; keep the overall texture at
the default “plywood” setting for now. With the Firestorm Viewer, you can ind out what the face
number is by selecting a face and checking the Build/Texture menu. The face highlighted is shown
there just below the Link and Unlink buttons (see the highlighted box in Figure 15.1).
3. Once you have colored face 4, take the cube into your inventory. To attach a HUD is easy; simply
ind the Test_HUD object in your inventory, right click to open the Actions menu, and select Attach
to HUD/Center. A red square should appear at the center of your screen; you are looking at face 4
of the cube, attached in the center position. This is shown in the lower image #3 of Figure 15.1.
4. To detach your Test_HUD cube from your screen, simply right click on it and pick detach from the
pie menu.
5. Try attaching the cube in the other HUD locations and see how it looks in each one. In some cases,
the Test_HUD may be mostly off the screen. This should indicate to you that the size of a HUD is
just as important as the spot it is located on the screen.
6. Detach the Test_HUD one more time and save it in a new folder you have named HUD_builder for
future use.
As you can see from your experimentation, there are eight possible starting positions for the attachment
of a HUD. Let's consider the relative importance and “rank,” if you will, of each position on the screen.
Obviously, the center and center 2 on the drop down menu are the most dominant positions. Since they
occupy the middle of your ield of view, they would be used for HUDs that are of primary importance for a
short amount of time, such as reading a text, looking at a map, or perhaps choosing the settings on an avatar
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