{"id":846,"date":"2009-09-27T20:23:48","date_gmt":"2009-09-27T10:23:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/?p=846"},"modified":"2009-09-27T21:01:10","modified_gmt":"2009-09-27T11:01:10","slug":"action-bar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/2009\/09\/27\/action-bar\/","title":{"rendered":"Action Bar"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ActionBar\"<\/a>Another boring screenshot today. \u00a0Ordinarily I would have made a video and posted it, but I have a big day tomorrow and am going to be getting to sleep early tonight. \u00a0Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow.<\/p>\n

Today I implemented the Action Bar that I mentioned on Wednesday last week.\u00a0The action bar has eight spaces for your primary commands, and up to six tabs along its top, which are used for secondary functions. \u00a0For example, in the shot above, the “Build” button opens the building toolbox, and the “Debark” tab causes you to stop piloting the Graveship. \u00a0(The Graveship hovers exactly where it is, and you can then walk around on top of it or jump off \u00a0or whatever). \u00a0There are two different action bars at the moment; \u00a0one for when you’re on foot, the other for when you’re piloting the Graveship. \u00a0The on-foot one has a Graveship call button, and other functions. \u00a0On the Graveship action bar, most of the primary slots will be taken up by various types of building; \u00a0“Build” will become “Cities”, and the other buttons will provide individual buildings, roads, walls, landscaping, NPCs, etc.<\/p>\n

The Action Bar, like the Context Matrix, is using the new “text-based commands” system, which makes it much faster and easier to create GUI interfaces to perform functions; \u00a0 writing GUI code should now be much less of a slog! \u00a0Note that while the Action Bar and the Context Matrix are both using text-based commands, they’re not (yet) actually using the same system; \u00a0eventually, I’ll need to merge the two together into a single unified system which can handle everything. \u00a0But for now, I’m quite happy with the improvement over the old way I was creating GUI elements.<\/p>\n

I also greatly improved the Graveship flight, just by adding a little polish to it. \u00a0It doesn’t actually fly any differently, but it feels different and better by having added a little visual lag to various elements. \u00a0You’ll see what I mean in the video that I’ll eventually do, when I have more time.<\/p>\n

And on a technical note.. \u00a0In the core VectorStorm library, I renamed the quaternion spherical linear interpolation routine from “Slerp()” to “vsQuaternionSlerp()”, to obey the standard VectorStorm naming practices. \u00a0A little embarrassed that I hadn’t noticed that before, but I hadn’t actually used it until now.<\/p>\n

As I mentioned above, tomorrow’s a big day for me, so I’m unlikely to get anything new done. \u00a0But the next tasks on my plate are (in no particular order):<\/p>\n