A new hobby project

I’ve been looking to start a new (semi-serious) hobby project. As usual with these things, the hard part is deciding what to make, not doing it (although I think this will be more than hard enough to make it interesting). I know I want to try creating a small(ish) game, and preferably something that I would enjoy myself. I also wanted to do it somewhat relevant to my job, where I use Java, so I decided to not use C++, which is the traditional language for these things. Should be exciting to see how that works.

To get started, I have been playing around with GUI programming, which is something I don’t usually do(at work I work on the server side of things). I created a small program to show panels on the screen, like so.

A panel being shown on screen

The panel shown is within the borders in the picture. Other examples.

Program options panel

Game options panel

For the program options panel, I also wrote some code for changing the screen resolution. I’m designing the program to run in fullscreen mode by default, and so far the resolution is the only option(supported resolutions taken from the OS). So, what happens when clicking on start in that last panel?

An empty panel to be precise

Well, right now, nothing. Or to be precise, an empty panel with a single functionality, which is to return to the main menu if ESC is pressed. So now I just need to make something interesting to fill that empty space with. Server side programming is more my turf, so this should hopefully go smoothly.

Adding GUI

If this project is going to end anywhere interesting, it needs a GUI. And GUI means windows, buttons etc etc. I created a GUI model, with elements, containers and all that good stuff. Or at least a prototype:

First Windows

Not too bad. But what is a GUI without mouse support? And windows that can be selected?

First Windows Show Off

So I have a GUI that can draw windows, and responds to mouse input. Not a bad start, although it still needs a lot of work. First job will be to allow text rendering.

Improving the configuration framework

In the last post I described the configuration framework I created for the Universal project. I also discovered an important limitation, I had not included list functionality. So I revised my visual guide:

Config Tree

I changed all the star types and icons to a new configuration file, and also added a new star type, witch is easy now, no code changes are needed.

Pretty?

Now I think it’s time to start adding some form of user interface.