UIs

This week, I just wanted to talk a bit about some of the UIs I have in Shagret. None of this is very fancy, and I think they go a long way towards spicing things up. At the very least, they provide distinction(which I think is very important in a modding game like NWN2, as it sometimes can seem like I've seen everything before).

My mod starts--relatively speaking, anyways--with the player finding themselves strapped to a Naga torture device. That's about the third worst thing you can find when waking up(oh, yes, I've made a list). They don't like the answers you give--they're a picky bunch--and so you have to fight through this. Now, originally, this was through conversation, but I realized that it was, well, boring. There was no feeling of urgency, danger or anything. Torture can't really be combat, either, so I was in something of a bind. Hench, the idea to create a custom UI to handle things and route the necessary scripts through it. After a bit of figuring, brotherly hello, and a healthy dose of Google searches on .xml coding, I had a working 'torture UI.'

During the torture scene, the player has to click the "resist" button to, well, resist. Your constitution score is factored into this as well as the in-game difficulty. Rest assured, you do not "lose" if you hit 0%. As a matter of fact, there are about 6 different ways this scene can go...

Looks painful. I wonder...if you had the chance, would you exact revenge on the Nagas?

Now, UIs need not be excuses for exciting(!) new gameplay opportunities. Rather, they can be used to allow the player access to information that they probably want to know(for whatever reason that might be). Frequently, when I'm playing, I want to know "how many creatures have I killed" or things like this. Maybe for bragging rights, maybe just because I'm a curious person. I don't judge your own reasons(except if you keep checking to see how many doors you've unlocked: you're probably a pervert). Because of this, I've implemented a stats page for the player to look at.

This shows where to access the stats page. This is a simple and elegant solution, I think.

Red Shards? What are those? I promise you, Shagret requires no collecting.

Font/etc might change--though, really, black font looks horrible in game for some reason--but this is the base idea. The player can check in at any point and see how they're doing with their stats. Simple and straightforward: always nice.

Addendum:

I'd also like to point those curious to a previous post I made on this subject(featuring a lovely new conversation UI). A little bit of change can go a long way, I think.

The Fred has released several lovely UIs on NWVault. At the very least, they're worth looking at. .Xml is not too difficult, really, and I think it can make projects interesting and, well, a pleasure to experience. If you have different 'things' in your mod, people will like you for it(mind you, I'm no expert, just a guy with some screenshots every week or so).

Next week, I hope to have that area design tutorial done. If not that, I want to talk about visual effects and maybe provide a tutorial on them. Until then, have fun!