ZOOMIE1980
Posts: 1284
Joined: 4/9/2004 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Damien Thorn quote:
ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980 Once again, I think it would be preferable if the game interface worked exactly like a standard Windows application written to Microsoft's User Interface Standards. Standard dialog buttons (like Ok and Cancel/Exit) in standard and CONSISTANT locations. Windows standard mousing, list paging, item selection, etc. Standard Windows menubar, toolbar, statusbar widgets. Yuck! Who wants to play agame that looks like a spreadsheet? I once played a game that ran on windows 3.1 and I never got the feeling that I was in a game. It always felt like a program but never like a game. I guess I wasn't alone in hating it because no company makes games that look like windows. People don't want to think about spreadsheets and word processers when they play their games. quote:
We all work in Windows in our daily work lives, ...and that's why we don't want to see them in our games. The UI could be improved in many ways but making the game look like windows isn't one of them. I disagree almost totally. We aren't talking about something looking like PowerPoint or Visio, at all. All those Panzer General genre games like Eastern Front, etc... were pure WIN32 apps with familiar menuing, dialog controls, and so on. But they used exetensive background brushing and ownerdrawn controls, to give a VERY game-like appearance, yet retained the highly functional standard Windows UI's. One of the single most popular turn based wargames in the 90's, Empire, was a 100% standard Windows interface. I have several recent war-games that are all standard Windows apps with standard UI widgets, just painted up real pretty. Hell, even Civ II and Civ-III, and all those SIMS were 100% PURE Windows UI's underneath. I think both were even written using MFC because they put the Visual C and MFC runtime dlls on your box if you didn't have them! Things like bitmap buttons, textured list and dialog backgrounds complete with complex graphical elemets are ALL quite common, but they are still standard WIN32 GUI widgets. And why waste so much programming man-hours debugging and proofing a home-grown UI and all its complexity and event management, when standard, usable, raock-solid and FREE Windows GUI toolkits are there for the taking! And many are CROSS-PLATFORM, meaning your game will run on Macs as well with nothing more than a cross compile and will present to a MAC user in a familiar MAC-like interface??? No brainer, IMHO.
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