Graphic Experiments

More documentation. I've decided to merge Pass 2 and Pass 3 into one project. That is, I am now prepping to rewrite the lower level things, fixing the rendering pipeline, and updating the visuals. It was coming apparent that any further "fixing" of the code was going to detract me away from that goal.

So now I'm auditing and documenting. Each function, global and struct is going to get identified and tucked away. I'm trying not to suffer from "Analysis Paralysis" but I want an opportunity to look at each function and figure out what each does and where it fits. I have the maps to do so, now I's just a matter of writing a header and jotting down parameters and returns. (I have a handy code snippet that I wrote in XML to help)  

As the documentation was getting a little repetitious, I spent the other half of my day drawing up a few graphical prototypes. The question I had was this: How do I maintain the graphic look of ROE, but move it away from the LCARS Star Trek-ish interface. You can argue that the garish 16 color interface isn't exactly Star Trek, but I wanted to try some prototypes anyway.

Click to Embiggen

I did the following using Inkscape ind Gimp. I am still thinking of using 1280x800 as my "native" resolution I also created a "stretched" copy @ 1920x1080 to see what it looked liked. It was good, but I may need to pin down the underlying technology first before I start stretching things.  (You can click on the picture to get the full version.) This is going to deal with a lot of transparencies and I'm not quite sold on the starfield background. The buttons that you can push can stand to be brighter. I also haven't played with any of the font types or colors. I still want to maintain the old color scheme. It's cure in it 16-color kind of way. I also know the globe in the center isn't earth in the actual game. That will need to be rendered.

Speaking if rendering. I may turn the title sequence into an 3D FMV. I may experiment with that later, as long as it doesn't detract from my coding too much.