Reverse engineering a game user interface -programming techniques

Question

Hello everyone, I have programmed some user interfaces throughout my career, however they have always been somewhat dull, amateurish, and ugly. I was just playing Starcraft 2 a few minutes ago and was wondering how is something like that implemented? They probably use OpenGL for the spaceship to do the 3-d but what do they use for their buttons and the panels that contain them? Some of the panels are animated too whenever the screen changes and parts will twist and slide out. Could these be PNGs that they had an artist draw up front and then the programmer just dropped or slid into place? Any thoughts are appreciated. Mj

Answer 1

My suggestion is to find a game that you can examine the source code. A good example is Racing Game which was designed to showcase Microsoft's XNA Framework and is written in C#. If memory serves correctly, this game has got some awesome UI elements, both pre- and in-game.

Answer 2

Scaleform is something of a de facto standard for AAA game studios. It allows implementing game UI using Adobe Flash.

Crazy Eddie's GUI System seems to be popular open source option. I believe it was used in Torchlight, but I'm not sure.

I'm not familiar with the exact effect you've mentioned, and I don't have any experience with Scaleform to know what it can do. But I think a great part of it has less to do with programming and more with polished game art assets.

HTH

Answer 3

Graphics are graphics - if they look better than yours it's probably because they paid good artists to make the art. It is quite likely that their GUI elements are just simple bitmaps, or maybe an arrangement of tiled and/or stretched bitmaps to facilitate resizable elements. But there's no real magic there. Just images.