Drakensang – Official Dev Diary #7

...hang on, there wouldn't even be any button to click...

As you already guessed, this entry is about the graphical user interface of Drakensang and the steps necessary to make some visible buttons that the player (you) can click on in the end. To explain how this process works, it would be best to demonstrate it with a simple ingame window, in this case the crafting window.

At some point the game design determined the function of this window and made the following requirements for the crafting window:

• recipe list for a selection of the different recipes
• ingredients for the selected recipe
• talent value of the hero has to be displayed
• [Build Button] for creating the recipe

Then, a graphic artist created a raw layout of the whole thing.

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...

The raw scene that emerged during this process can be used by the programmer and, based on this, he can start to combine the graphical elements with the code.

We have a graphic scene, where our button [Build] is laying around. Now we press the button and the programmer provides the following thing to happen: