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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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!