Week 24/2013: Game selection menu, UI shaders
Last week I was refining the new UI widgets.
I made a few adjustments to task bar access keys based on feedback. Esc will now open just the game menu. Shift-Esc will open just the task bar, focusing the console command line to allow immediately entering commands. Shift-Esc will then dismiss the task bar and console completely, while a plain Esc will first close the console and then another press will hide the task bar. I still intend to add bindings to emulate the old behavior of opening/closing the console+taskbar quickly with any input event of one's choosing.
The old Control Panel menu item in the games' Options menu has been replaced with one for showing the task bar.
I made several improvements to the so called Ring Zero UI. This is the mode the engine is in when no game is loaded. Everything visible on the screen in Ring Zero is now drawn using the new GL2 code. The biggest change is that there is now a graphical menu for picking the game to play:
I also got a chance to put the new GL2 shader functionality into use by blurring the background of the console log. This is quite significant from a technical point of view: it is the first official use of OpenGL shaders in Doomsday. Obviously the biggest impact of shaders will come from the map renderer, but applying shaders in the UI is the low-hanging fruit here (the screenshot is brightened up a bit to see the effect more clearly):
Finally, I continued work on the UI framework by extracting a generic ScrollAreaWidget from the log history widget. This will allow using the same scrolling behavior and appearance for all scrollable widgets in the future.
We are now switching to the Candidate phase for 1.11. I will continue polishing the new UI code and will also try to address the Shell's missing Game Options (at least to some degree).
I made a few adjustments to task bar access keys based on feedback. Esc will now open just the game menu. Shift-Esc will open just the task bar, focusing the console command line to allow immediately entering commands. Shift-Esc will then dismiss the task bar and console completely, while a plain Esc will first close the console and then another press will hide the task bar. I still intend to add bindings to emulate the old behavior of opening/closing the console+taskbar quickly with any input event of one's choosing.
The old Control Panel menu item in the games' Options menu has been replaced with one for showing the task bar.
I made several improvements to the so called Ring Zero UI. This is the mode the engine is in when no game is loaded. Everything visible on the screen in Ring Zero is now drawn using the new GL2 code. The biggest change is that there is now a graphical menu for picking the game to play:
I also got a chance to put the new GL2 shader functionality into use by blurring the background of the console log. This is quite significant from a technical point of view: it is the first official use of OpenGL shaders in Doomsday. Obviously the biggest impact of shaders will come from the map renderer, but applying shaders in the UI is the low-hanging fruit here (the screenshot is brightened up a bit to see the effect more clearly):
Finally, I continued work on the UI framework by extracting a generic ScrollAreaWidget from the log history widget. This will allow using the same scrolling behavior and appearance for all scrollable widgets in the future.
We are now switching to the Candidate phase for 1.11. I will continue polishing the new UI code and will also try to address the Shell's missing Game Options (at least to some degree).