IronManBeta
Posts: 4132
Joined: 2/25/2002
From: Burlington, Ontario
Status: offline
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Part of my day job is to design software interfaces that are clean and usable, so that is a compliment indeed!
I develop in a package called Borland Delphi. It is based on Borland's old Turbo Pascal programming language but is light years ahead of it - and most other competitive products. When it came out in 1995 or so it was intended to be a 'Visual Basic killer' and indeed it had that potential, but no one can outmarket the guys in Redmond and it never garned more than a 7-10% market share. It killed off Powerbuilder though (remember them?).
At work all we care about is results and have no particular 'religious' feelings about one language over another. We had an opportunity to make a clean switch from DOS programming to Windows pogramming in 95 or so and I looked at absolutely everything at the time. I picked Delphi and have never regretted it since. For a while I tried to keep up on Visual C++ but the productivity hit was so great that I eventually just gave up. I need to be able to crank out industrial strength apps on a schedule and then maintain them effortlessly - this was the only solution to that need.
As an aside, you may have heard that Microsoft is now betting the company on a new technology called ".Net". Anders Helsberg, the man behind .Net (as much as any one person can be) and tipped as one of the 5 rising stars at MS was the original father of Delphi. He has been busy rewriting it as "C#" to bring all its power and features to the VB and VC worlds without actually using the Delphi name anywhere at any point - hilarious! You might see me switch to C# at some point (like I said, I'm not religious about these things) but only if it is cheaper, more powerful and more functional than what I have already. Thats a pretty big hurdle right now....
To specifics. What you see in the screenshot is a standard windows app that has been fancied up with third party 'skinnable components'. The original prototype was a strict windows-look implementation only. Functional but bereft of eye candy. Matrix has it's standards and FPG was distinctly lacking in visual oomph. Nearly all of its other games are in VC and use a somewhat cumbersome sounding scheme to render the beautiful screens that you see. David told me to be ready to do the same but I had seen an alternative method come floating over the Delphi web sites and it revolved around packages of windows components (buttons, edit boxes, scroll bars) etc that had been modified to accept WinAmp type skins. I converted the app in an afternoon to the look you see in the screenshots and sent it off to Matrix. Zero extra development overhead, no burden of creating your own user interface, instant accessibility to everyone who already knows how to use a Windows program, etc, etc. They immediately wanted the equivilent for VC and I blithely assured them that similar packages must be out there. Ooops, Delphi scores again, none of us were able to find any skinning packages for VC that were anywhere close in power or features.
Anyway, there were several packages to choose from and after extensive testing we switched to a different one. Same idea but the game looks a little different right now. The actual skin set is just placeholder art until Marc S gets back from vacation and can render me a set unique to the game (separate skins for US, West German, Soviet, British, and neutral pre-game). They will switch on the fly as you progress through the game. All of the standard windows components that we know and love (yeah, right) will be in the final game, just looking a little different than Bill intended. I'm hoping this will keep the game as accessible as possible during the critical first out-of-box-experience and yet give it a stylish flair that will complement the terrific maps that we are getting.
Thanks for your interest, Rob.
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Looking at the screen shot... - 
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