Knights and Merchants.net Forum

@FeyBart: KaM Remake does not have controls animation yet. The only exception is credits text moving up. However idea is nice, maybe we implement it someday )

He's made it smaller than it was before, compare the old with the new:




The text in the second message can be moved up so it uses more of the scroll space rather than wasting it.

That's nice. How does implementing animation support work anyway? Would there be stock software you can just use?

@FeyBart: Implementing animations requires an Animator class. Controls that need to be animated report to it and say "I need to go from this to that position, in this trajectory and do it in 500ms please". Then Animator would be called each frame and update controls that he has enlisted, removing them after animation has ended. Kind of like so.

So you give the program some coordinates, like image A must come from X=300, Y=200, and go to X=200, Y=100 in half a second? Is it also possible to make it change the size of an image or sprite like that?

It's not a program, it's a class that we would write for our controls library. It wouldn't need to be very complicated, it just needs to update the position of the control every frame. Changing size is harder to implement unless we make our controls support scaling in a much simpler way than they do currently (it wouldn't be hard to do for a single image or something though).

If it would have to update it every key frame, wouldn't that make it lag a lot?

@FeyBart: Actually no. Remake already does hundreds of thousands of updates each tick and each frame. Computers are good at crunching numbers

Heh, I guess computers are a lot faster than I am. Makes me think of those 90's computer commercials.
Especially the ones with John Cleese in 'em.

The animator just needs to update the X and Y position of the control, that's just two floating point numbers to be calculated and stored back to memory (a very simple operation) to be used next time the control renders itself. It should only take a dozen or so clock cycles, and even with just a 1GHz CPU you get 1,000,000,000 clock cycles per second Even if you wanted to render at 100 FPS that's still 10,000,000 clock cycles per frame (ignoring the fact that game logic and other stuff also needs to share CPU resources). So we can certainly afford to update a few X Y coordinates.

Note: thinking in terms of clock cycles is generally a bad idea because that's an over simplistic model of how a CPU works, but it gives you a rough impression of just how good at crunching numbers computers really are.

Dang. And I thought my teacher was good at maths...

There is a problem: making it less yellow and bright easily makes it as gray and dull as the old one. Pick one out of 3:

A:



B:



C:

Making it grey is okay, because it is not the most important element in UI. Players top attention still goes to whats happening in town/battle. We don't have a "pause on read" mode.

I pick C, but with some suggestions: lighten black areas, they don't need that much contrast, make the rope volume when it goes above/on scroll, make it even less saturated, check how it looks on 1920x1080 display.

Good work!

I also like C, it's far better than the original dull KaM one

I prefer B. It looks unfamiliar at first, but it is very smooth and the letters are very readable, so it's easy to read fast.