The Mana World Forums

I got an idea for big displays like 1024x768 have something like this



so we can have more room in fullscreen instead of the bulky chat and windows clogging our sight thanks guys just an idea i had

Padding out the margins with windows that are normally covering the action? I could support this.

i guess it was doener who already had a working version in higher resolution maybe he could merge that into tmw

ya its just a good idea gives more room gets the stuff out of your hair and looks 10 times better

pretty much everyone is running 1024x768 or higher nowadays. might be worth thinking about completely changing to some fixed "L"-layout around the ingame area, at least for the windows that are open most of the time anyways. just making them translucent is suboptimal imho.

l33t mspaint "design study":


yes, that's not very secret-of-manaish, but having chat, map, stats window s blocking half of the screen isn't either...
another (more old-school) idea to get the screen "clean" would be to just have a small hp/mp bar (without background window), -maybe- a translucent map, and messages would just pop up at the bottom of the screen (like fps console messages) and disappear soon after

good way to put it thanks

I dont like on screen gui

I like better a small box or somethin of that sort and full screen is map more less

You should create a tab for the chat box and put it on the side. Like set the chat box on the side and have a arrow and when you click the arrow the chat box shows up. Along with the stats and item bar.

Magick wrote:You should create a tab for the chat box and put it on the side. Like set the chat box on the side and have a arrow and when you click the arrow the chat box shows up. Along with the stats and item bar.

I agree, and the arrow should flash/pulsate when there are unread private/personal messages

To get back to the topic of screen usage on higher resolution than 800x600, I think we could scale the map and objects (at least in OpenGL) to fit any resolution, while keeping the GUI elements 1:1. So you wouldn't see more in a higher resolution, but you would have more space for the windows.

One problem with this may be that the graphics will appear too blurred, but we'll have to test it. When it's too blurred the original suggestion by Tenche would still be an option, where we could place some kind of default border around the viewport.

Or we could do it in a few ways, release and weed out the ways that get no support from the players: alpha testing is a nice phase, isn't it..?

Bjørn wrote:To get back to the topic of screen usage on higher resolution than 800x600, I think we could scale the map and objects (at least in OpenGL) to fit any resolution, while keeping the GUI elements 1:1. So you wouldn't see more in a higher resolution, but you would have more space for the windows.

That could be allright, but the base resolution that things are scaled from should be 1024x768; ktm was correct in the statement that most people are running with that or better these days. Scaling down to fit smaller resolutions shouldn't be any problem, although I would quite like to use Magick's suggestion of tabbed offscreen windows (although I think basic stats should always be visible; perhaps in a bar along the top rather than a box in the corner).

I've been playing with higher resolutions in the CVS version on Windows and it works out pretty well. I haven't tried it on Linux yet though. I'm not noticing any distortion or anything like that other than the opening graphic which I didn't scale in my build.

javaroast wrote:I've been playing with higher resolutions in the CVS version on Windows and it works out pretty well. I haven't tried it on Linux yet though. I'm not noticing any distortion or anything like that other than the opening graphic which I didn't scale in my build.

The thing we'd want to prevent though, is one player seeing more than another player simply because he runs a higher resolution. The 800x600 guy would have a hard time hiding from the 1600x1200 guy.

Anyway for this purpose of course the server only tells the client about things that are near, hence when running higher resolution it should happen more often that you see things appearing or disappearing within visual range.

for that, we could have some kind of "semi-transparent fog of war" (letting some of the terain shine through), and smoothly fade in the beings once they enter the non fogged area. gameplay-wise, just showing more of the map (without monsters) would be pretty useless though.