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Man, this is a slow news day, really. Nevertheless, we found a new Horizons Dev Diary at Horizons Stratics. Rick Simmons, Director of Engineering, talks about the progress they are making. Here's an excerpt:
Our first pass of inventory, as with most other user interfaces, focused on implementing core functionality without too much visual appeal (read programmer “art”). This allowed us to develop and refine the core UI systems and client to server messaging without having to worry too much about how the information was presented. An additional result of this process is that our inventory system is loosely coupled to the interface, allowing us to make changes to how the player interacts with the inventory system with minimal code changes. For Milestone 7 we really focused ourselves on trying to revise the interface so that it was intuitive and allowed a player to get what they wanted done in a quick and easy manner. Representative interface art was generated, which, while being superior to previous programmer art, will be iterated to achieve even better results. More careful attention to the user experience resulted in core UI improvements and the development of additional widgets. The inventory layout was carefully considered, and after much discussion and several proposals - motion sensitive headgear to navigate was my favorite - we implemented what we feel is styled a very good interface. Testing with people who are new to the interface will tell us how good a job we did, what needs to be changed, or if we need to reconsider our approach. |
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Horizons Dev Journal at Horizons Stratics
