Monday, 1 November 2010

MUSHclient GUI: 02-Oct-2010

Donky on MudBytes suggested that he didn't like energy bars that were both candy coloured and gradients, so I created a screenshot without gradients on the bottom energy bars:

(click image to enlarge)

And another with paler bars:

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Here they are again, just the bars this time:

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I'm also toying with a red that fits better with the slateblue - firebrick is quite nice, but perhaps a bit dark?  I also used forestgreen instead of green, as it's a fraction less harsh.

(click image to enlarge)

Here are a selection of slightly different shades of bar I tried:


In the end I settled for the last one.  So, back to the plugin again...

I'm now using the new energy bar colours, and they're pretty nice.  While playing with them I noticed that the bars were off by 1 pixel - that is, they had 2 "bright" pixels in the middle despite being an odd number of pixels high, so they got a bit darker at the top than than at the bottom.  I tried changing them to have 1 bright pixel in the centre, but they didn't look as good, so in the end I changed them to 3 bright pixels (which required manually drawing an extra line in the middle).  A lot of work for something most people probably wouldn't notice, but once I'd seen it I felt compelled to fix it.  Did the same for the enemy avatar's energy bar, even though it's thinner - once again it looked a bit iffy with just 1 bright pixel in the centre.

Based on a suggestion from Alayla, I've also added a (1 pixel wide) black line at the left and right end of each bar.

Alayla has provided some new movement icons - a pouncing boot, a retreating boot, a wing (for hovering, flying and swooping) and a fin (for swimming).  In combination with the coloured text, this provides full coverage for all the different movement speeds.

I've left the pie-shaped timers for now, as I think they're a fairly good way to see at a glance which spells are soon to expire - but I still plan to do more work on them.  Their brightness now only changes when the duration drops below 60 seconds.

(click image to enlarge)

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