Drakensang: The Dark Eye Developer Diary #7

Drakensang.info has posted a seventh developer diary for Radon Labs’ Drakensang: The Dark Eye, in which programmer Arne Schnurr talks about the creation of the game’s user interface.

After that, the creation of the window can begin. For that purpose you create a graphic scene that covers all intended GUI elements for the Layout, like buttons, lists, text label, and so on. In the case of Drakensang this’d be 3D scenery, for which we created GUI elements like buttons, lists and so on, with some plugins specifically developed for that purpose. The look and the important attributes, like text or scroll direction of the lists, can be directly modified. These attributes are attached to the graphical objects and after exporting the scene they can be read by the programmers directly from the source code. Of course, it is also possible to change the attributes directly within the source code. So, the text of a button can still be changed when the game is already running…