ID:1535419
 
I've been here for a while, and posted a guide or two, asked many questions, and fell on my face. During development of my game, I came up with a really cool HUD datum and modified it and, well, I came up with something that if pretty darn awesome. I've mentioned it a few times here and there, but I now want to show a preview of what I have worked on in at my leisure--well, one of the major components of it anyway.

The HUD Datum
Every UI is composed of many different components that work together so that the user can interface with the game (or program or whatever). There are many things that compose a UI, including text. This datum aims to take the heavy work out of creating those elements while making it easy to use and making it easy to extend or override. Many UI elements are included from the start such as resource bars (complete with matrix transformations!), windows, buttons, DMI text (with tags so you can change the color, have special characters or even change the font on the fly), and Frames.

The Concept of a Frame
When creating thus UI datum, I thought back to other MMOs and their UIs. One of the things that I picked up was that many things were referred to as “frames”. It then hit me that these were synonymous to picture frames (or scrapbook frames in our case, or...I don't know, just bear with me!). Each frame is a collection of objects in a list (or an object containing multiple objects “attached” to it), like a board with many notes pinned to it. We'd have an HP bar and an MP bar pinned to a “StatusWindow” frame, for example.
Frames give you a bit of extra control and a way to organize your UI in your code. While you don't have to use them, it is a good idea if you're using a lot of UI elements and you need to hide them or show them all at once (or etc.)!

Override and Extend to Your Heart's Content
If you want to add more functionality to a UI element, you can! BYOND makes this really easy; all you need to do is specify the element (or datum) and add additional procs, vars, or verbs—and you don't even have to modify the existing file itself. The HUD will come with a complete instruction manual on how to use it so you can get started right away. Customize it and go nuts.

When Is This Coming Out?!
When it is done. New job has slowed me down quite a bit so it'll take a while (and I hope I won't forget it!) but the HUD datum is nearly complete. Text and ResourceBars need their final functions added (mainly Text's tag for specifying an icon and icon state for a single character and the ability to return the number of lines of text for another UI element, and ResourceBar's ability to have vertical life bars). Then I'll want to ensure that code is cleaned up and bug-free. And I'll want to decide on a name for it, too.

And now a picture of what I have so far (bear in mind it's a test level so there's lots of weird debug and all. At the least I want to complete the datum even if the game never happens)
http://i251.photobucket.com/albums/gg302/WontoonKangaroo/ uipreview.png

(PS: I didn't know where to put this so if it's in the wrong forum I apologize)

Edit: Stupid Photobucket resizing my images. Here's a full res link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11802753/uipreview.png
Frames are called Groups in Forum_account's HUD Groups library. It's nice to see some variation, and it looks like it works.
In response to Kaiochao
Ah, so this was already done!

Ah well, at the very least I hope this is useful to someone, if not the Frames then at least the HUD objects I created.