Me again, annoying Visual Scripting request guy.

In my spare time I do a lot of user interface design. Im well known in the litestep/deviantart community for great graphical interfaces and usability.

I would like to volunteer my services in UI work for Esenthel. The power of esenthel is not apparent to us noobs because it seems a little bit complex and scary. Once I started doing the tutorials, it became more and more apparent how amazing this engine is.

I have a degree in user interface design and user interaction, so I would like to help with the GUI/UI aspect of things, perhaps give Esenthel more time to work on the core?

In the last update I noticed that the UI had been unified into one window with 3 modes - this shows the future of this toolset and I would like to help refine that.

I can produce photoshop mockups to specification and proper individual UI elements and icons with a degree of professionalism and quality at corporate level, perhaps higher.

I can also provide input on any UI guidelines issues that may appear.

Obviously, I have an ulterior motive behind this - I want to use esenthel myself - but as I am still learning the engine I want to contribute in some way in the meantime.

Let me know what you think, Esenthel.

-Ash

Hi!

I'm open to any suggestions/contributions.

Great! so what are your next plans for the UI? You state in your timeline you want to improve the tools, is that in reference to the GUI?

-Ash

No, that's about functionality.

I think the UI element that needs most work is the font rendering. I've not been able to make fonts at sizes as small as the default windows GUI font look good/readable.

EE should support real ClearType fonts and ClearType/LCD font smoothing (at least for small text).

If you've ever zoomed into a screenshot from windows explorer or anything else where windows does the font rendering, you'll see that the edges are colored. This makes the fonts appear even smoother.
Not even Photoshop supports ClearType fonts making it impossible to reconstruct UI or website screenshots.

The UI in esenthel is rendered in dirextx - it is not GDI rendered.

All of the UI is more or less "game scenes." Cleartype wont work in this example.

This makes my proposal difficult, but I am working on it. I would like to see the preliminary visual scripting system first before I draw up anything solid though.

If Esenthel were to use a GDI or similar user interface instead with windows inside it for the 3d content, it would be possible. Additionally, this may seem like going backwards but I think it is the best way to do so as the UI elements wont slow down if the game scene is heavily taxed.

I am basing my proposed design on a cleaner, more refined version of the electron toolset, as this allows an insane amount of information to be accessible at once.

-Ash

I agree in a way that one day the Esenthel tools UI should move to something similar to the way the electron toolset looks (never used it though). Perhaps using something like Qt or Mono for the cross-platform compatibility. I've worked with these libraries before and I don't think this would be to hard to do. It would also really open up the Esethel tools to add a lot more functionality to them in a simple and quick manner.

Well... snap.

Every time I am about to release a layout, esenthel updates and already has that layout.

Are you reading my mind esenthel? wtf?

First, you integrated all the tools... then the tabs on top... the moving the object browser to the world editor... lol - its exactly the way my layout is.

Should I even bother? You work faster than I can thank of changes!

-Ash