Thinking about some RPG..Android version.

[EgonOlsen]

Any plans on publishing on Google Play?

Yes, but it's still a long way to go before that. At least some basic game play should be included before i publish something somewhere.

[EgonOlsen]

I'm working on some simple gui classes ATM, but i've got nothing to show right now. However, i tried if i could use the additional power of the Nexus 7 tablet (compared to my Nexus S phone) to crank up the details a little bit (i.e. add more grass patches). It turned out, that there isn't that much room for improvement... i could increase it a notch or two, but that doesn't really add much to the visuals. On the desktop however, this is possible (so much for mobile devices reaching for the desktop in terms of performance...):

[Thomas.]

From my experience rendering grass this way is very slow. In my another game (out of project page) I'm using triangles (and simple shader) for oat and it is very fast. I was inspired by vegetation from FarCry 2... And your game looks very nice with a lot of grass

[EgonOlsen]

From my experience rendering grass this way is very slow.

Which way do you mean?

[Thomas.]

From your screenshots I would estimate two transparent and billboarded triangles with texture... right? If it is only one triangle, you can try to use two triangles. In particle system was the use of two triangles faster about 10% (maybe because count of rendering pixels was lower)

[EgonOlsen]

Yes, they are billboarded quads which are dynamically added to the scene based on the camera's position and orientation. The algorithm that cares about this was a brain flash of mine that i stopped understanding right after implementing it...

[EgonOlsen]

Grunt work, i.e. implementing a basic GUI framework for doing...the GUI...like the inventory and a quest book and whatnot. ATM, it can render basic elements like windows, labels, buttons, images, group them, define drag-and-drop sources and targets and scale the GUI. This is the test case on the desktop resembling a basic inventory screen, where you can move items around and stack them:

[EgonOlsen]

More grunt work on the GUI...i really hate making GUIs and/or GUI frameworks. I somehow always feel dirty afterwards...anyway, it now has the inventory, a quickslot bar (right to the inventory), the player's silhouette to equip items and a text area with item descriptions. Draging, stacking and splitting seems to work fine now between all components, but the code that handles this looks like s**t...

Anyway...



Edit: Nothing in this prototype is final btw...it's just a kind of reusable test case (which means that most of the stuff should be usable in the actual game).

[fireside]

Nice GUI.  I'm replaying Betrayal at Krondor, which I really love.  They kept it simple by not letting the player carry too many items.  I feel the same about GUI.  I don't like working on it, but it is really important to the game.   An overly complex GUI makes the game drag. 

[EgonOlsen]

...plus it has to be usable and readable on a smartphone display. What i currently have seems to work fine on the desktop but i'm not so sure if it will do the same on the phone. I added tabs on top of the inventory section and did a rescaled mock-up to see the actual size on the phone...it didn't look too promising...

[EgonOlsen]

Tabs and more items to test with and such...

[Thomas.]

Nice work are you using different images for different screen resolution?

[EgonOlsen]

No. The gui scales with the screen height and that includes the images for the items. At 800*480, they are already scaled up a little as each item is 32*32 pixels in size and covers a ~50*50 rectangle on screen.

[EgonOlsen]

Tried the GUI on the actual Android device...apart from some bugs in the scaling code, it worked fine but it was unusable, at least on the phone (it worked ok on the tablet). Tabs were to small, font was too small and dragging required some luck...so i reworked it by enlarging the tabs and the font and making the items larger while dragging...works much better now, but still not perfect.

Anyway...

[fireside]

I think it looks better with the redesign.  Making the items larger during drag was a good idea.