Saturday, December 23, 2006

Day 344 : Gooey Gui

I never thought something so trivial would end up being such a quicksand. Again it's great that something like CEGUI exists and that people took the time to build such a system and share it for free, but at the same time it's such a mess that, considering how trivial and limited the GUI requirements of my project are, it becomes legitimate to ask myself if it would have been faster to build my own GUI system from scratch.

I've spend the last weeks ping-ponging between the ideas of either taking TaharezLook and modifying it with the look of my game or create my own skin from scratch. I started with the latter and was faced with the mishmashy reality of the CEGUI system. Not the best design I've ever seen. Forums don't give a lot of answers either. XML files upon XML files of redundant data. For example, suppose I want to rename TaharezLook to SomethingElseLook, I'll have hundreds of occurrences of TaharezLook/ to search and replace with SomethingElseLook/. And a single mistake in one of the 4-5 XML files that constitute a skin will yield weird error messages that don't help pinpoint the problem that much. This just shouldn't be.

Anyway, after 2 weeks I give up. I'll just give a quick coat of paint on top of TaharezLook and be done with this. It's not critical enough to justify the extra delays. I'm entering a rather critical phase of development. The plan is to have something playable at the end of the Christmas vacations on the 14th. And not a prototype but something complete. GUI, mission/weapon selection etc. Let's see how this plan holds up.

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