HUD

[giantrobotbee]

Need to understand what our needs are for the game HUD. I have a placeholder for the money, but need to understand better how to do live text labels, and then I can read in the value we're updating in the MainController. What other HUD components will we need? Here's a few ideas:

• Current build's/upgrades and statuses
• Alerts for things that need your attention (This is burning, Incoming Kaiju, etc)
• Money counter (mentioned above)

Any others?

I would imagine the first two would be hidden inside a collapsable menu since having them on screen at all times might make the screen very cluttered, but I assume doing such menus is more complex.

[kylekellogg]

This is a really good point, @drmanitoba. I spaced on us needing dynamic text for values like money and possibly time. I thought we could simplify and be able to use 100% static text copy.

As far as the ideas you've proposed, I think they're both good. So far only money should need dynamic text (e.g. build/upgrade status we can use a progress bar, status of building we can use progress bar for health, alerts can be simple, programmatically animated images, etc)

Instead of a collapsable menu, I propose having the statuses be tied to the plots/buildings and only shown on hover. For Alerts, those could also be tied to plots (or the plots themselves) and animate as a blinking red overlay or whatever.

If we do have to do a collapsable menu, I know the maths for it as I've had to do them before. It's a bit funky, however, so if we can stick away from it we'll be better off.

[kylekellogg]

I'm looking into the dynamic 2D text presently

[kylekellogg]

Looks like we'll have to use some GUILabels to do this. I'm not a huge fan of them, especially if we ever want to use a custom font, but I'll set it up so that we can use these.