Silk Games HUDs & Onscreen Text - Silver Version

by Silk Games
Silk Games HUDs & Onscreen Text - Silver Version
Learn how to make HUDs from the team who made them popular on BYOND!
ID:109275
 

The hallmark of any Silk Games project is a slick and intuitive interface. From Acheron's Awakening (unreleased) to Proelium II and NEStalgia, we have been fine tuning and perfecting our onscreen Heads Up Display menus and text for years. It's been a long wait, but we'd like to finally share what we've learned and provide all BYONDers with the core of our trademark HUD systems.

How it works:

The Silk Games HUD system uses a hybrid of screen objects and images. If you're unfamiliar with those terms, look up screen var (client) and image objects in the BYOND Reference browser.

Screen objects are generally more versatile and easier to work with, but images are faster. Our system uses screen objects to construct the menus and images to draw the onscreen text.

All menus are created only once (when the world boots up) and are stored for easy access. Opening or closing a menu is as simple as adding/removing a list from client.screen, with virtually none of the slowdown typical of other HUD systems on BYOND.

To define individual menus, you simply set a menu name and the anchor points for the top-left and bottom-right corners. The same goes for clickable buttons on your HUD, as well as drawing text onscreen. There is no real effort required -- all that you need to do is to decide where you want to position your HUD elements.

Everything from the look of the menus to the text font is easily customizable; this system can be adapted to fit any game.

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Please feel free to use this comments section to post any questions you have about the demo.

If you end up using this system in your game then you should also post a link here so that other users can check out what you've made!
What does the silver version mean? Sounds like we might have to pay for a gold version...
I don't get how this is already so popular. How many people did Silk get to favor this? It doesn't even do too much yet.
OrangeWeapons wrote:
I don't get how this is already so popular. How many people did Silk get to favor this? It doesn't even do too much yet.

If you're referring to the number of downloads, it's likely because people have been asking for a Silk Games HUD tutorial for years now.

This demo isn't meant to do a lot, just to demonstrate the simple concepts behind our fast and efficient HUDs and onscreen text :)


Rockeyx2 wrote:
What does the silver version mean? Sounds like we might have to pay for a gold version...

My plan is to charge for the Gold Version, yes. It's important to note that this Silver Version will always remain free, and the Gold Version will simply offer additional demonstrations of much more complex HUDs.
SilkWizard tsk tsk tsk You always have something you have to pay for. I'm sure you get enough money from subscriptions as it is no need to be greedy.
Again, this Silver Version is 100% free and always will be.

I'll go over this in depth when we release the Gold Version: there is nothing greedy about getting paid for the work that you do. In the case of this HUD system, we've put years into perfecting it. We'll simply be trading value for value, and no one will be forced to buy it :)
Any estimates on how much the Gold Version will cost? I really like this demo and I'd love to see what more it can do.
LordAndrew wrote:
Any estimates on how much the Gold Version will cost? I really like this demo and I'd love to see what more it can do.

Good question. That's going to depend upon how much more stuff I cram into the Gold Version - I want to make sure that it will be worth the money. Right now I'm looking at $5 to $7.
My bad SilkWizard, at the time I was ignorant and confused about the current Byond popularity and listings, since it was so new.
It was good, but it was hard to understand. Idk
Amazing!
First time using HUD in these scales... really in handy! thank you very mutch.
Helpful really .
Amazing, I very much prefer this to interface elements. Looking forward to seeing what you can cram into the gold version.
Wow this is very useful, thank you for uploading this.
Nice
Regarding this library, I would like to create my own font. However my last attempt the proportion distance between different letters is different. Capital letters versus lower cases will have a dramatic space between them and lets say H and s will have the same effect. Is there a font size that has to be even (12, 14, 16) or odd (13, 15, 17). I was trying this with paint; typing out each letter with font size 12 and copy and past them into a dmi. What do I need to do?

~Ripper Man5~
Three years later and... what? =/
Gold?