Progress... The main menu!

[Blade]

After much toil we have finally got to the point we can properly draw the games main menu. Behind this there is a lot of initialisation code that sets things up for the game proper, but that isn't strictly needed just to draw the menu and its buttons, so don't look at this as only a bit of drawing code. Basically, whatever the game had to do to get to this point, our code can more or less now do (no videos yet I'm afraid )

 

There are still issues to resolve though. For one thing, the original game doesn't follow what is now a standard game loop of input > logic > render, but instead relied on being able to draw directly to the frame buffer, which was possible under Direct X and DOS, but isn't so much under modern graphics frame works. Currently we use a timed callback on the main thread to draw the mouse as the original does and at the same time we refresh the screen. This happens at 60 fps, but whether this is workable as the game gets more complex or for higher resolutions remains to be seen as we are just pushing the whole frame buffer to the SDL renderer in one go.

 

Another issue that we are currently having is that our event handling doesn't appear to be polling correctly, currently to activate a button you have to mash the mouse repeatedly to get the event recognised, so the next thing we need to pour some time into debugging is the input handler.

 

At any rate, getting to the point where we can display the main menu as the original did is a fairly big milestone for us, as it represents the first interactive part of the game that a user will typically encounter.

[Nyerguds]

Nice, nice

[Messiah]

Instead of "Aftermath Missions" and Counterstrike Missions" I would suggest a menu with "Custom Missions" for user-created stuff and "Expansion Missions" for the official missions, like in the latest RA versions.

[Blade]

Instead of "Aftermath Missions" and Counterstrike Missions" I would suggest a menu with "Custom Missions" for user-created stuff and "Expansion Missions" for the official missions, like in the latest RA versions.

 

This isn't a finalised menu structure so don't worry, we only just got the thing drawing. Currently its just text anyhow, the buttons don't do anything yet and we can label them anything we want.

[Allen262]

Glad to see thing are still going!

[Chad1233]

Personally i always liked the Counsterstrike and Aftermath button in 3.03, maybe you should move the Movies and Intro & Sneak Peak into a Options button then add Custom Mission.