OpenRA: Time for a chrome overhaul
Tuesday 31 August 2010 - Filed under Uncategorized
As part of the general polishing of everything in OpenRA, we’re talking about replacing the ingame chrome with something a little more… polished. We know we need a few things that the current chrome doesn’t have:
- Orders palette for selected units
- More useful unit stats in production tooltips
- Objectives display for singleplayer missions (oh, yeah, we support singleplayer now, sortof)
I’m currently thinking the new orders palette should be combined with the production palette – and the whole thing reworked to be more like SC / Generals / AoE. To that end, I’ve started painting new square production buttons, which are looking surprisingly like the old C&C DOS sidebar buttons. I’m not really surprised – massaging the in-game art is a far easier path to having something recognizable (with few pixels) than fussing around with captures from the FMVs. Here’s the CNC AFLD, in normal, rollover, disabled, and partially-built states. The CNC HARV is done the same way, but with a different rollover effect – which I think I like better. BIKE shows some shortcomings of this technique, though – large areas of blank, with a tiny unit in the middle.
We’ll probably do one more for “locked” tech as well, for singleplayer use. We’ll probably also use a different color for each side’s chrome – GDI will most likely be yellow, and the RA sides will be blue and soviet-red, which is a bit purer than the tone I’ve used for this Nod mockup:
2010-08-31 » admin