faBBe

Anyone tried ?

I was toying with the idea of making a vertical gauge beside the vertical-aligned spell gems.

This way the mana bar would have been part of the spell bar, and hence you can make a melee/hybrid caster generic interface that works for everyone, replace mana with exp on player window, and if player plays a pure melee class, his spellbar window is not on and thus mana is not on..


--faB

PS: you can still use the idea with a horizontal mana bar and a horizontal spell gems bar I guess...

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grottel

at this time gauges are hardcoded to a horizontal fill.
see the sticky thread under REQUESTS section to see other common ideas that aren't able to be done.

Rolleo

This is crude, but use your imagination. I had a thought about this, but haven't actually created any special fill bars so I don't know how it all works yet. What if we used something like this as the image file:



As I understand it, it uses the fill image (red triangle) and either moves it left or subtracts from the image leaving blank space. This gives the appearance of the bubbles filling and emptying.

Now, here is a crude time lapse of what i'm talking about. you can see the effect the bubble-bar has as the triangle is moved left through it. Try to focus on just what's inside the bubble-bar to see the effect:



Make sense? Like I said, I don't know if the fill image is allowed to be larger then the bar image. I don't know if the fill image would be visible the whole time, or if only the space inside the bubble-bar image would be viewable, with the rest transparent. It's just a thought I had.

faBBe

This is interesting Rolleo, I'm pretty sure it won't work though.

Much of this so-called XML engine is actually hard coded.

Gauges are typically horizontal (I have given up on vertical ones).

The texture you use to fill, sadly will not be able to 'scroll' behind, and wouldn't be masked either.

I have also found that the different parts that make up the gauge take their sizes from the UI2D definition, that is the graphics need to be to the exact proportion you display them (which is usually a good idea anyway but sometimes you could reuse graphics by sizing them.. wont work).

Bah, no big deal.

SevenSeasJim

You have the right idea Rolleo but your example wouldnt work.

What they do is just subtract space from your fill design from right to left. There isnt any movement.

the best way ive found to get non standard movement is to use multiple bars


cheapo ex


----- is negative space ( 0 alpha)
x is your fill image
... used as a spacer cause it eats my whitespace

make 4 hp bars

---------x
------x---
---x------
x---------


then line them up like this

.---------x
....-------x---
.........---x------
.............x---------

voila ghetto top to bottom gauge

each section will still fill left to right but it will also appear to fill top to bottom




edit: my fav way to get negative space on my images is to tell the xml that my image is larger than it really is, because it sets the fill graphic's size to whatever you tell it the images size is


e.g. you want your "x" fill image to show up as the 14-0% of the gauge only

say your image is really located at x3 y3 and its size is 3x 3y...


you tell the xml that it starts at x3 y3 and is 21x 3y in size
the gauge will fill as if the image is 21long and only show your image being cut off when it gets to the very end of the gauge.

if you want the image to be at the right side of the gauge and show 100-86% locate your image at x21 y3 and tell it that it starts at x3 y3 and is x21 y3 in size

the only catch is you need to keep the overlapping coordinates that you used blank and 0 alpha in your tga so that you dont get an unrelated image showing up in your gauge.

I am lazy and wasteful so i make a new tga for each graphic i use, so this isnt a problem for me :/



hope this helps...