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[evertvorster]

How does one add a ToDo to a PR?
The art with this one is terrible, but it should get the point across.

The computer is also a better interface as it works on all resolutions, it looks pretty OK, and it's the one you will be using the entire game through.

• Example Todo

[nabaco]

Added an example Todo.
Could you share some screenshots please?

[evertvorster]

@nabaco My hand drawn art is not anything exciting to look at, so be warned.
When launching the game with the room.mission, you will be dropped at your room.

The interface is the same that you will have in any other base, ie: mouse navigation, with hot spots on the screen. In this image, there are two hotspots. The infotainment screen on the wall, and the door.

When clicking on the infotainment screen, you are brought to the "About" Screen. This will give a little bit of light reading on the game of Vega Strike. Ideally pre-rendered with hot spots for exit, "History" and "Credits"

Clicking on "Exit" takes you back to the room.
Clicking on "Credits" opens the credits screen, with a fine list of people who have contributed to Vega Strike, as well as people and organizations that we would like to thank.

Clicking on "History" Brings you to the history of the universe. This may be a longer document, so there might have to be PgUp and PgDn buttons too.

So, that's the infotainment system. Pretty anemic for the time period we are aiming for, but it's extensible

Back in the room, the door's hot spot currently says exit to mission computer, but could say anything like "Back to work!" or whatever.
Clicking on it opens the mission computer, where you can start a new game, load an old one, even start a net game if you know how, or exit back to the room. This is the same mission computer used in the rest of the game, so if the interface is not familiar to you will soon be.
Currently it plugs in to Special/Empty system, and so news and info is empty. I do believe that there are ways of enabling & disabling the buttons on top, or go directly to the load/save function of the computer. That is a topic for further research should you find this idea palatable.

It provides consistency with the rest of the game, and most importantly for me looks good on all resolutions and text sizes.

[evertvorster]

OK, I have been playing with this some more, basically tidying up. Now the computer interface does not give you useless information when you exit the room.

Also, I have been updating the images. While I am waiting for someone to render a better room, I re-did the room in pencil, so now it looks like this:

The information screens have also been re-done, and now look like this:

[nabaco]

Hi @HeadClot, you were looking for some artist work. Could you possibly help us out here?

[LifWirser]

Are you talking some kind of skin with a viewer? As an alternate to graphic lobby? or as a standard commerce interface?

[royfalk]

This looks really interesting.
Three questions:

1. What is still needed to be done here if any?
2. How does this connect in the game? How can I go to my room?
3. How do I test it?

[evertvorster]

This looks really interesting. Three questions:

1. What is still needed to be done here if any?
2. How does this connect in the game? How can I go to my room?
3. How do I test it?

1. We are having issues with the text overlapping in the default game start menu, and this is a way of working around that by using the existing base interface that you get on every base in the game. It does still need some work, of course.

2. Same as with the game start menu now, you can't go back into your room in the game. This is just where you wake up and start the day of flying/trading/fighting or whatever you do in Vega Strike. When you exit the game, your character won't just be sitting in the cockpit of the ship, right? He/she needs to have a place to rest. Could be a cabin on the space ship?

3. Ooh, this is a long time ago. I would have to look it up again to be sure. I think you just change the normal startup script to start up in room.mission or something.

[evertvorster]

Ah, just to test it...

The vegastrike engine allows you to set a custom mission. So, on my machine, I run this:

/usr/bin/vegastrike-engine -d/usr/share/vegastrike/ room.mission

[evertvorster]

We could, of course change the art quite a bit. I was playing around with some generative AI art, this is just a proof of concept.

[evertvorster]

Thinking about this some more, I can screenshot the current information and credit screens, and pay homage by having the original vegastrike graphics displayed on a screen in the "base" which is your room.

The only real loss here is the campaign information when you start a new game, but I can also screenshot that, and just make the information available. Unfortunately I don't think there is an easy way to make it start a new game, though. Unless I am missing something.

In short, if this is something you might consider using, I can devote some energy towards it and polish it up.

Once we have consensus that this is what we would like to go for, we can change the default mission that the game starts up in to this one... and then finally scrap the main menu interface if there are no objections.

[royfalk]

A couple of comments:

1. If this replaces the start campaign because the fonts/spacing are bad, let's fix that.
2. The fact you can't go back in 'start new campaign' is a bug.
3. If this replaces the main menu, that's a cool idea I can totally get behind.

I think this should wait until we have a better GUI infrastructure. I can push through most of your issues but that would take time I'm not sure we want to spend right now. If this can wait, let's open an issue referencing this PR and close it.

[evertvorster]

Thanks for looking at this.
So, I have worked a bit on the art with Dall-E 3.
Here is a screenshot of what I have so far:

Since this is a paid service of Dall-e, I own the copyrights to this image, and will freely sign it over to the Vega Strike project. Some of the original artwork of the game was used in creating this, and this is to pay homage to the artwork of the game. We can discuss whether this is appropriate, and allowed.

Using this as a base texture is fairly easy, Ill update this PR to show you how I imagine it would work.
Using the base interface instead of the main menu interface means that the main menu interface code is not used anymore, and once we are happy with this interface we can retire the main menu interface. I had a good try at making the text not overlap, but it was beyond me. Also, all that code is only used once when the game starts, and then never again.

What I plan to do next is to set vegastrike up to have the text nice and legible, and then screenshot each of the screens you get when running through Campaign, Introduction and Credits. Linking these into a "base" is also fairly straight forward.
As these are screenshots of the text that is displayed, updating the credits text would be a bit tricky.

For the "Game Options" I plan to link that to the mission computer, where you can load a game, or start a new one. At the end of the "Campaign" series of screens you would typically get a new game, but I don't see an easy way of doing that from a base, but luckily enough the computer interface provides a way of starting a new game, so no functionality is lost.

The alternate way would be for someone that knows Python better than me to fix the main menu text spacing so it does not overlap.

We still need to either remove the multiplayer option, or have some text that this will be implemented in the future.
If we manage to fix the main menu interface text overlap, then it carries with it the advantage that the credits text can be easily modified to give credit to newer contributors to the project.

[evertvorster]

The more I think about this, the more I agree with you that it would be better to just fix the overlapping text in the main_menu.py.

I have made a comment to the issue that I put on the engine that covers this, however the issue should probably have been to the Assets, as that is where main_menu.py lives.