Anon42
patreon
Options!
🕑 Added 2018-04-24 15:15:32 +0000 UTC Hey everybody! Sorry it's been a while since I had an update, I've been working on unexciting things behind the scenes, like working with Flynn to finalize our UI design and searching out fonts for use in the game. The good news is, while none of that was particularly worth sharing, the end result of all the work is! If you're a member of our Discord server, you might have seen some of this stuff already - if not, I highly recommend you join it! I share updates and host occasional polls with both patrons and non-patrons alike every once in a while, especially when they're too small to justify a post here. You can join up by either linking your Discord account with Patreon to gain patron status, or just clicking this link to join as a normal member: https://discord.gg/EH6tqqtEnough of that though, on to the meat of the post! There have been a lot of minor updates to the menus since last update, so I'm not going to go into the old menus, you can see them for yourself when v.30 comes out. First up is the new options menu!
As you can see, we now have a much more complete menu than the old black-screen-with-white-text shtick. Ignore the last button. I plan on adding more button prompts, like in the upper right corner, to let the player know how to navigate the menu at a glance, as well. Next up is the controls menu!
The controls menu keeps the same visual style as the other menus, even using essentially the same window shape as the map menu (which was the first reworked menu we did, available in the last update.) Unlike before, the gamepad and keyboard menus are now consolidated into one, allowing you to view the controls for each much easier. In addition to this, while it's not fully pictured above, the controls for the menu are now completely separate from the gameplay controls, allowing you to fully customize your controls however is most comfortable. Now at this point you might be asking, why does the screen use PS4 button prompts? Surely the Xbox controller is more common. Well, my answer to that lies in the video/audio menu!
Many games will try to register what type of controller is being used and change the button prompts automatically to match - however, in my experience, these systems are extremely wonky and don't often work properly, which is why I've made the decision to make it a manual choice instead. This menu is very incomplete at the moment, and it could change quite a bit by the time v.30 comes out, but all of these options will be available - most of them are self-explanatory, but the Gamepad Style option allows you to choose between Xbox and PS4-styled gamepad icons, and the Button Prompts option allows you to choose whether the game will default to showing Keyboard or Gamepad icons whenever it shows a button prompt. Eventually the Audio options will have sliders that allow you to freely control their volume level, but I'm not sure if that'll make it in for v.30, it'll depend on how difficult that ends up being. Next up is one small preview before I end the post.. 
I'm not going to go into detail about this page - it's just a mockup right now, not actually an in-game shot - but it looks like there's something new here I haven't talked about before..
I have some family visiting soon, so I might not be super active for a bit, but I'll try to get as much done as possible to avoid delaying v.30 even further. It definitely won't make it before May, though, sorry about that - I'll be sending the update to everyone who's pledged during its development, so if you choose to cancel your pledge now, I understand, and you'll still receive the update once it comes out. With that said, hope you're all having a great day, and thank you so much for the support! See ya next update!
-A42
Comments
Anon42
RB and LB act as tab switching, so the only way I could do that would be disabling the ability to change tabs in favor of switching between options menus, or by adding in more menu keybinds - and I don't think it's really worth adding even more keybinds just for one options menu when it's only a few more inputs to back out and choose a new option. There's a point where too many controls is overkill, you know? As far as window resizing, I won't be making the window stretchable (because like you mentioned, it kills the aspect ratio), but that's what the Window Size option is for. I need to make sure I can code it properly first, so take this with a grain of salt, but what I WANT to do is read the size of the monitor being used and allow the player to scale up the window as high as their monitor will allow, in increments of 100% to keep the aspect ratio intact - so at 3440x1440 your max size would be 1920x1440.
DrakeLeith
Under options you should be able to tab with RB/LB between Video, Audio and such like the Dark Souls inventory menus or make them separate clickable menus. It would go like this, Menu -> Options -> Video. Like this <a href="https://imgur.com/a/2Dznu1p." rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://imgur.com/a/2Dznu1p.</a> Can the window be re-sizeable then? I ask because I'm at 3440x1440 so I have issues with 1080 being very small and some windows if I stretch them not keeping the aspect ratio.
Anon42
Not sure if that's a compliment or a complaint with the UI..? That's fine, you're under no obligation to join the discord - I still post all major updates here, and obviously anything playable goes up here at the same time - I just don't want to spam everyone's emails by constantly posting small things here, so Discord patrons will get to see smaller updates more often than I post on Patreon, and I wanted patrons to be aware of that.
Anon42
Definitely not, there are way too many options to put everything into one menu - it would be super clunky with how much you'd have to scroll, it works far better in separate menus. I've already put Video and Audio together, and depending on how many options end up in those menus I MIGHT squeeze content in there as well, but at the very least controls are staying separate. As far as borderless windowed goes, as much as I would love to implement it, sadly I don't think my engine supports it in any way, so it'd be impossible :(
ZULEYKA GAMES
Great work and good pace) Take care of yourself, wherever you are.
DrakeLeith
You should amalgamate Controls, Video, Audio and Content into one options menu and then rename "Options" in the in-game hud to "Menu". Also don't forget about borderless!
Decanter
Somehow this GUI reminds me of McDonald's. re Discord: No thanks, I like keeping my porn life separate from general chat and Discord is very much against multiple logins.
