Particle's Projects

[(Designer)Particle]

4 minutes ago, Cricket said:

These look great!

9 more buttons left!

 

[(Designer)Particle]

Purple buttons are done... so, I'm going to take a little time to go over everything and clean up some code and last minute whatnots and then sometime tomorrow I will pack this up in a ztd and upload it here.

 

 

[(Designer)Particle]

Ok, let's do this:

 

First thing I want to say is that if you download this and test it... thank you so much for helping me out here.  I know only a few of you will be reading this thread but that is all I need right now is a few good testers.  I really appreciate it.

 

Second thing I want to say is that for the last 9 days I have been working my ass off on this, like 8-10 hours a day.  My brain is so tired.  I feel like I'm missing something, like a lot of things, and I already have found things that I forgot, like 9 buttons in the zoo stats panel that I missed.  I say this not to complain at all, only to say please forgive me if there are things still to do... this is only a test/preview of this mod, not a FINAL version, and in the next 2 weeks or so I'm going to just try to finish every little thing, refine every little thing and make it better, fix any bugs, etc.  I will be paying attention to this thread closely while I do that.  BUT, having said that, it works pretty dang good right now, I think, because as I said before this is actually the second version of this mod I've made.

 

Make sure the first thing you do is uninstall all my old UI hacks if you are using them.  Also, this will not work with any other "hack" mods that alter pretty much any UI layout file from the game.  Fortunately at this time the list of mods that will not work with this is pretty small.  The 2 we know of at the moment are Jay's Purchase Baby Hack (which we already have a fix for), and Jay's developer map editor hack/menu hack.  For now if you want to use a map editor with my UI mod, you can use the Zoo Admin Map Editor by lowenfrau. 

 

Now I'm sure there will be other mods that will not work with this, there has to be...  so if you find any issues with compatibility please let me know!  As I said before, I want to get every mod to work with this thing, and the first part of that is just figuring out which older mods will break.

 

If you do load up both Jay's mods with this one you may find yourself having trouble exiting the game.  In this case try hitting f1 to bring up the file options.

 

particleUI_lost_amethyst_test1.ztd

 

I will also update the first post in this thread to point to this download, so that if you are in a hurry to find the current test projects from this thread, you should be able to just look in the first post and find them.  :)

[(Designer)Particle]

Ok, now some notes about this thing.  First thing you might notice is that I changed the game options, they are all in one panel, and you can access them from the start page.  This is kind of nice, but a few of the things just won't work while you're in the start menu, like for example, you can't change the volume for the start menu while you're in the start menu, for some reason it won't actually change the volume until after you leave the start menu and come back, but still, enough things worked that I think it makes for some quality of life.  Mainly you can switch to windowed mode, or change screen sizes from the start screen, so that is super nice.

 

Because the file options used to be on the game options panel, but they just wouldn't really be appropriate in the start menu, I have moved those to the help panel, so now you can access those from the floppy disk button, in the main window, and also you can access the game options from the little gear button.  The reason I did it this way instead of just making a new panel for file options is... I can't just make a new panel.  The game won't really let me do a lot of things, to be honest, it is very rigid about what can function in these layout files, BUT... I figured out a few tricks here and there, and moving the file options to the help panel was how I am currently dealing with this.  You can bring this panel up with f1 at any time, so it does seem to me to be the best answer for where to put the file options.

 

So I made this screenshot (below) a little while ago to show cricket some things... #1 was to redo those buttons but since that is done, let's skip to 2.

 

2.  Sometimes the little icons here have a green background.  I will be working on fixing these icons to have transparent backgrounds.  For now, don't worry about that.  Most of the icons from dinosaur digs and marine mania have transparent backgrounds already.

 

3.  There are a lot of fun things I can do to still make things look better.  For example:  this building icon is kind of ugly, and has always bugged me.  Because I had to make it with a pink background, I could actually change it to be anything I want now.  So what kind of building should I use for that?  Ice cream stand?  Drink Stand?  Anyways... I'm mentioning it because it is an example of more I could do if I want.  I have a whole list of things like this to work on still.

 

4.  Down here at the bottom, you can see the money color is still green.  That is because I couldn't figure out how to change that color.  The game engine makes that one text green every time at startup.  Also, game messages get colored red/green sometimes and I can't change that.  I was able to change 99% of things, but still there is a few things I just can't change.  The green bars near the money though, I can change those, but they are 3 colors, red when low, yellow when in the middle, and green when high, so changing that color scheme requires something that matches the screen and still makes sense.  I haven't messed with those yet but I might.  So there are some things I can't change, and a few things I just haven't changed yet because they make sense the way they are.  Again... This is not a finished mod, and I may figure more things out or change things as time goes on.

 

 

If you happen to actually play through the old scenarios, the first few have screenshots of the old UI.  I think I will fix that eventually, but just for now beware.  Also, I haven't tested all the scenarios with the new UI, although I did test the first 3.  In the next week or 2 I will be playing through all the scenarios, just to make sure there are no issues there.

 

That's it for now, feel free to ask any questions or report any issues, I'll be checking in a lot for the next few days in case things come up.

[(Designer)Particle]

So what do you guys think?  Are you having any issues or problems?

[(Admin)Cricket]

I've had no issues yet!

[(Designer)Particle]

That is excellent. 

[(Designer)VeganCannibalism]

Rock-solid so far for me! You've done excellent work on this, man! :D

[(Designer)Particle]

5 minutes ago, VeganCannibalism said:

Rock-solid so far for me! You've done excellent work on this, man! :D

Nice!  Can I ask what operating system you are using?

[(Designer)VeganCannibalism]

34 minutes ago, Particle said:

Nice!  Can I ask what operating system you are using?

I'm on Windows 10. :)