Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
'
n
You don
t have to roll your own UI code anymore.
n
UI code is easy to write, but making a good UI is an art form.
If your interface code doesn
t use polygonal hit testing or bitmap collision, you are
destined to have legions of square buttons and other controls populating your inter-
face. That
'
s not only a dull and uncreative look, but your artists will probably strangle
you before you ever finish your game. Artists need the freedom to grow organic
shapes in the interface and will resist all those vertical and horizontal lines.
Localization is a huge subject, but a significant part of that subject is interface design.
You may hear things like,
“
make all your buttons 50 percent wider for German text,
”
as the be-all end-all for localization. While that statement is certainly true, there
'
'
sa
lot more to it than that. It
s difficult to achieve an excellent interface using nothing
but icons instead of clear text labels. One of the casino games I worked on at Com-
pulsive Development used this approach, and the team was completely stymied with
the problem of choosing an international icon for features like blackjack insurance
and placing a repeat bet on a roulette table. The fact is that international symbols
are used and recognized for men
'
s bathrooms and locating baggage
claim, but they are only recognized because they are extremely common and follow
international standards
'
s and women
'
hardly something you should expect with a random icon in
your game. If you use icons, more power to you, but you
—
'
d better provide some tool-
tips to go along with them.
A truly international application has to conform to much more than left-to-right,
top-to-bottom blocks of text. Asian and Middle Eastern languages don
'
t always fol-
low Western European
All you can really count on is being able to print
text to a definable rectangle. If you have to print lots of text, consider using a well-
known format like HTML or Flash and be done with it.
Since the first edition of this topic was published, there has been a lot of good work
done in user interface systems you can grab from the open source community or
license. Scaleform is probably the most well known, implementing a Flash-based
UI in almost any platform on the market. RADGameTools has also entered the
fray with their Iggy product. There
“
sensibility.
”
'
s even an open source library, gameswf, that
you can use, but be very careful with it. The gameswf library might seem like a
great way to save money, but you
ll quickly realize that it allocates and frees memory
hundreds of times per frame, and that
'
s not good for your game and will fragment
your memory like nothing you thought possible. You
'
ll spend just as much time fixing
it as licensing something. Also, it stands to reason that if you license a Flash-based UI
system, you need someone who knows something about making user interfaces in Flash.
'
