Mouse and Keyboard friendly menu mod

Post » Tue May 07, 2013 3:06 am

I was having a play with the menu/hud files some more today with my St.Patrick's Day hangover and decided to have a go at making some of the in game menus a little more mouse and keyboard friendly.

First on the chopping block was the ridiculous Weapons & Ammo quick select thing, I find that menu particularly hateful with a mouse.

Although I still don't really grasp how the actionscript in the swf is interfacing with the game ifself, I managed to cobble together a perfectly functional and fast radial menu for the weapons in the quick use slots.

Instead of having the ammo and weapons appear at opposite ends of the screen, the ammo appears right in the centre with the 4 weapon quick use slots around the outside of the ammo, so you don't have to go across the whole screen to get from the weapons to the ammo.
The menu also now works on mouse over instead of clicking on anything, so you just move the mouse roughly in the direction of the weapon (they have great big hit boxes) then back to the middle on the ammo you'd like to select and let go of the modifier. I'm actually surprised at how well it works at this stage.

Obligatory screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/VIIMR

It's still pretty ugly since I pretty much just butchered the existing two menus to throw it together, but I'll tidy it up a bit tomorrow while I work on a few other things I'd like to try add to it and I'll upload the hud.swf and .fla files for other people to use them in their own mods if they'd like, there's not really much point in bundling it into a mod on its own.

I'll probably shorten the opening and closing animations quite a bit just so it's a little quicker to use but I'd like to figure out how to get the game to pause for a menu, like when you open the inventory, but I've a funny feeling that's not actually part of the menu file and the game itself does that before opening the menu.
If I can find a way getting all the weapons on there, that'll be sorted too, I just haven't come across the code for that yet.
There should also be a way of checking if the user is using a gamepad or a keyboard & mouse in actionscript, once I find that I'll be able to have both menus in the same file at the minute it's just the mouse friendly one.
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BRIANNA
 
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Post » Mon May 06, 2013 5:54 pm

i like it, hope to see more changes on this.
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sam smith
 
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Post » Tue May 07, 2013 7:58 am

oh wow, that looks great. nice work!
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Ann Church
 
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Post » Tue May 07, 2013 7:50 am

I like it BarryK. Nice work.
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Devils Cheek
 
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Post » Tue May 07, 2013 3:02 am

Looking good. And yeah it's always been weird to have to get the mouse over to the sides away from each other
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DAVId Bryant
 
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Post » Tue May 07, 2013 9:09 am

Cheers guys.

I decided today that to really pretty it up I'll have to redraw a lot of the graphics and animations, which will take a few days to really get right (I'm really not much of an artist lol) but in the mean time, incase anyone wants to have a play with it I've bundled it into a mod

alt_quickuse mod link (140MB): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8oe-HhxJ93QYkVhMl9TaUs0bVU/edit?usp=sharing
alt_quickuse source link (3MB): https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8oe-HhxJ93QQkpZZFRCcjh3YTQ/edit?usp=sharing

The mod link is a prebuilt mod with it included so the folder in the RAR just needs dropped in the Rage mods folder. The source archive is the edited HUD.fla and HUD.swf files so you can build it into your own mods or just have a poke at the changes to see how it works.

The source link is for the tool kit, the HUD.swf and HUD.fla files need to go in the base/swf folder and then delete the old generated files for the swf in base/generated/swf (hud.bimage, hud.bswf and hud.tga)

I'm not entirely sure if that last step is necessary, but I do it anyway, just to make sure they get generated with each change so I don't have to rebuild the mod every time to test it in the tool kit. I'm not sure if it'll automatically check if the swf has changed everytime or just when you're building a mod but removing those files from the generated folder does the trick.

The version there still has the gamepad controls mapped to it as well, they just don't make an awful amount of sense with that layout. I've tested it a fair bit and it seems bug free, just ugly, but if you do find any bugs with it let me know so I can get it fixed.
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Barbequtie
 
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Post » Tue May 07, 2013 7:52 am

Dude, this is just sweet!

Hey, is it possible to make a healthbar?
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R.I.P
 
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