Check out Singollo's gui. Beautiful. Makes mine look elementary with my few gauges and buttons. I'm inspired!


Http://img147.exs.cx/img147/5563/ss4qi.jpg

Here's a working link:

http://img147.exs.cx/img147/5563/ss4qi.jpg

Yes, it is quite nice.

Better than mine.

Yet he still has the same body parts picture.

Are there no other pictures of human bodies on the net!?

How can you play with so much clutter .

I have three gauges just above my command line and thats it..

It's an acquired taste, I think.

Yea, I don't like a lot of the fluff. I prefer the slightly more minimalist look of Thorgal's and Amaru's. I prefer even less fluff though.

I love skins and interfaces, its my taste. Personally its very non-distracting for me. And no, there weren't any better body scan pictures that I found, and I did already use the Vitruvian man for the parry inset.

I have a set of seven gauges for deep wounds, along with four buttons that go with them, so they both show my deep wounds and allow me to use them to change my targetting, parry, and stance, all in a fairly compact space that's quick to use. I don't think I'd want to give up all that real estate to the pretty picture of a body, myself, particularly if it didn't do anything.

Honestly, unless you're very very good with a mouse, if you're clicking things in the midst of battle to determine parry, heals and targetting you're going to be bested a lot.

My interface does all of those things (minus targetting since I don't have a need for that). Its possible to do all of those things without making a jungle of compact buttons. If you insist on using a mouse then I'd suggest looking at speed menus before using buttons to do things like targetting, parrying, etc.

Speed menus aren't very speedy. Using the multi-state button option during combat (or even just a spammy conversation or activity) is impossible. zMUD re-creates the menu every time you get input, invalidating your menu commands. There are ways around it, but I never got it working the way I wanted. I'm just going to write my own mini-GUI in C++ and link it in with UDP.

I can't imagine putting all those things on my zmud, it's already slow as heck, don't need to make it any slower.

It doesn't slow it down at all except when it starts up and shuts down.

Mousing is only a slow-down if your every action needs your fingers on your keys. There's other ways of developing a system than that. But frankly, most of my target and parry and stance changes aren't done by those gauges: they're primarily indicators. They just serve double duty because why not? And there are times when it's just more intuitive and thus quicker to see a gauge reading a danger level in an eye-catching red, and click on it to switch parry and stance to protect it.

Using the mouse is definitely noobish, but can be occasionally useful for things like system-heavy aliases, when you know what you want to do but forget the alias. I have a couple of dropdowns... let's see if I can attach my screenshot..

Amaru: imageshack.us

My Achaea system had a series of little squares at the bottom. There was a section for balances, then herb affs, salve affs, then specials (prisming, etc). They'd get a lot brighter whenever they were 'active'. That's all I needed. Pulling the eye away from the prompt area will always slow you down, and the way I fought I needed to know near instantly what afflictions I and my opponent had so I could pick the next venom combo correctly. Plus, it was pure C++ with no UDP/callbacks involved so it was bitching fast.

That said, all of these fancy (*cough* slow) zMud things are easy on the eyes.

No free host is big enough for the bmp. It's 2.5mb... I'll just put the jpeg, ignore the poor quality.

Having all those fancy pictures and such doesn't bog down combat at all?

I just don't see the reason to throw away tools from the toolkit. Having one doesn't prevent you using the others too.

No, the same way my desktop wallpaper doesn't slow my comp down after startup. Why would it?