With Vietnam 2.00 having been out for over a week now, it is due time to get the Sneak Peeks started again, right!
We aim to have two annual updates out going forward, and with this big one out now for the Remastered Edition, the Summer update will be focusing on the UI side of things.
There's a good few players out there with 4K displays, and it is not clear sailing for out'r Win32 api game engine and how it does - or does not - Desktop Scale for some of you. It is a Win32 thiing, too. it has a rudimentary Scale but nothing like the latest UI frameworks have.
We are addressing this by trying to have at least the worst offenders out of the way.
While we were vetting the builds, I had a new fork out with version control, and changed all the fonts in the game to WIndows system fonts. Gone are Arial from game engine itself, and Times New Roman from map labels.
I did a few quick mock ups to select a way forward, too. I briefly tried C++ and WinUI3 integration, which is the latest Microsoft offering. I tried that with linked libraries, but the CLI bridge just refused to co-operate with me when trying to use the WinUI3 dll from Win32 exe.
Next, as I really wanted to use C# and WPF rather, I thought to create an independent desktop dialog app the game engine would launch and communicate with using named pipes. That actually worked a treat, so while I am still deciding the way forward, this seems to have solved two issues.
Scenario Briefings can now be kept open aside the game. The current iteration, if used in a single display, goes to background if you click at game titlebar, but remains in front while playing the game. Here it is with my Wide Screen where I put it to right side of display, where it can lay unobstructed.
And for all Damage and Assault related stuff, a new Intel Feed dialog app. This is smaller, you can move it around as well, similar to Scenario Briefing, you can resize it, but this one always stays at the top of things. So with single display, it hovers there all the time. Instead of those tiny messages that previously needed to be managed manually, or to put a timer to them, all that is now forwarded here.
- WPFpipeservers.jpg (523.65 KiB) Viewed 1932 times
After these ones have proved their mettle with some further testing and tweaking, I will try to make the Jump map non-modal, but keeping it WIn32. So, hopefully in the next update, Jump map is always available and up to date for quickly zooming into another area of the game map. In Vietnam particularly, those maps are quite large, so I think this would be quite helpful.
Let me hear what you all think
PS Unit List at the left side is most certainly on the to-do list. Note how for instance the Hex Info dialog has text that is actually in the bitmap image, and not dynamic font. Same with the Unit Compass Rose. We can do better than that.
