Dialog-Help Tool, needed?

[Cr34p]

Hey guys, actually I got kinda borred and started working on a small tool to make dialog creation easier, since one can see placement etc.

Actually it looks something like this:

Show

It features:
- Resolution can be choosen
- Generates the code which could be inserted into the galaxy editor

Since it's just a small tool much more isn't really needed , but if you think something could be added

In the current version dialogs are shown ass rectangles with a color you choose. And all dialogs are listed up in a tree so one gets an overview of what stuff is included

 

[Statharas]

Great tool! when are you gonna release it?

 

[mrzwach]

Useful tool. This would likely make setting up custom UI much easier/faster.

Would be nice if you could add in support for images, because some (such as the race borders) have transparent borders, meaning the actually image displayed does not appear to be the same size as the size you set it to. Look at "Assets\Textures\ui_frame_big_corner_topleft_protoss.dds" if you don't know what I mean by this. Also, rotating would be nice too.

However, I would like to point out that the size of dialog items is not measured in pixels. Just recently, I was testing to see what size image would fill up my entire screen, after noticing that an image that was 1440x900 pixels did not (which is my screen res). I found that the image filled up my screen at 1920x1200 pixels, which I found to be my screen resolution multiplied by 1.3repeating. Furthermore, when I changed the settings in SC2 to a different resolution and restarted, all my dialog items appeared in exactly the same positions - meaning that if someone is playing on a huge monitor, everything will appear to be extremely small regardless of how they change their settings.

I thought this was strange. So, I went to a friend and asked him to do the same thing I did. His monitor at the time was 1280x1024, but the image size that would fill up his entire screen was 1600x1280, which was his resolution multiplied by 1.25. To make matters worse, the function that returns the position of the mouse in pixels uses actual pixels, which, as shown by these tests, do not correspond to the relative size or position of dialog items.


Anyways, regardless of the failures of Blizzard, this seems like a very useful tool for designing custom UI.

 

[Mille25]

i did also start such a tool a time ago, but i stopped developing because i noticed that it needs to be absolutly perfect to be useful.
its quite hard to create a perfect preview of what it will look like ingame and make it productive.

anyways, good luck, but imo it could be very hard to create a tool that matches sc2 to 100% in output and is productive, thats why i asked blizzard to give us such a tool since it shouldn be a big deal for a big company like blizzard to add this.

with a tool that is integrated into the editor it would for example be possible to change the background image of a dialog directly in the gui designer and see how it looks like and so on.

 

[Statharas]

Useful tool. This would likely make setting up custom UI much easier/faster.

Would be nice if you could add in support for images, because some (such as the race borders) have transparent borders, meaning the actually image displayed does not appear to be the same size as the size you set it to. Look at "Assets\Textures\ui_frame_big_corner_topleft_protoss.dds" if you don't know what I mean by this. Also, rotating would be nice too.

However, I would like to point out that the size of dialog items is not measured in pixels. Just recently, I was testing to see what size image would fill up my entire screen, after noticing that an image that was 1440x900 pixels did not (which is my screen res). I found that the image filled up my screen at 1920x1200 pixels, which I found to be my screen resolution multiplied by 1.3repeating. Furthermore, when I changed the settings in SC2 to a different resolution and restarted, all my dialog items appeared in exactly the same positions - meaning that if someone is playing on a huge monitor, everything will appear to be extremely small regardless of how they change their settings.

I thought this was strange. So, I went to a friend and asked him to do the same thing I did. His monitor at the time was 1280x1024, but the image size that would fill up his entire screen was 1600x1280, which was his resolution multiplied by 1.25. To make matters worse, the function that returns the position of the mouse in pixels uses actual pixels, which, as shown by these tests, do not correspond to the relative size or position of dialog items.


Anyways, regardless of the failures of Blizzard, this seems like a very useful tool for designing custom UI.

Ugh, i think that you should decrease it UNDER 1000*800

 

[Cr34p]

Useful tool. This would likely make setting up custom UI much easier/faster.

Would be nice if you could add in support for images, because some (such as the race borders) have transparent borders, meaning the actually image displayed does not appear to be the same size as the size you set it to. Look at "Assets\Textures\ui_frame_big_corner_topleft_protoss.dds" if you don't know what I mean by this. Also, rotating would be nice too.

However, I would like to point out that the size of dialog items is not measured in pixels. Just recently, I was testing to see what size image would fill up my entire screen, after noticing that an image that was 1440x900 pixels did not (which is my screen res). I found that the image filled up my screen at 1920x1200 pixels, which I found to be my screen resolution multiplied by 1.3repeating. Furthermore, when I changed the settings in SC2 to a different resolution and restarted, all my dialog items appeared in exactly the same positions - meaning that if someone is playing on a huge monitor, everything will appear to be extremely small regardless of how they change their settings.

I thought this was strange. So, I went to a friend and asked him to do the same thing I did. His monitor at the time was 1280x1024, but the image size that would fill up his entire screen was 1600x1280, which was his resolution multiplied by 1.25. To make matters worse, the function that returns the position of the mouse in pixels uses actual pixels, which, as shown by these tests, do not correspond to the relative size or position of dialog items.


Anyways, regardless of the failures of Blizzard, this seems like a very useful tool for designing custom UI.

hm if you are right, that would suck a bit

anyway, images can be supported and that was on my list

I keep working the next days so maybe I can release a first version next monday

 

[Vengeancekael]

WoW just what everyone needs This will make UI creations much more faster. Good job

 

[Dark Hunter1357]

this is epic! because when i make my dialogs with GUI i usually test the map 100 times before i like the result.

 

[Cr34p]

So did some more work on it, now supports nearly all item-types... except image, but only because I don't have a fitting image for test reasons now

Show

I'm trying to find a way to speed up item adding, since actually one have to click 4buttons to create 1

 

[TwentyThree]

This is still being created right? I would love to have a tool for this and it seems a pity that it would stop...