You can preorder PA at the Uber Store
So I'm going to ramble on a little bit here about the engine architecture for the UI of Planetary Annihilation. This is by no means a completely description, just whatever I feel like rambling about while watching the turkey get prepped.
Game UI systems are, generally speaking, a disaster. You have quite a few choices but none of them are really great. Building UI is difficult and time consuming. Combine that with whacky tools and you can end up in a pretty bad place. Furthermore one of our primary design goals it the ability for end users to mod and improve the UI, preferably in a way that allows mods to work together with each other.
What that really means is that we can't just bake the UI into some C++ code. Even a DLL system would have issues because we are cross platform. We need a flexible and extensible system for building UI that's available everywhere. Having something that is commonly used and that has a set of existing tools is also a bonus. In addition since so much of our UberNet infrastructure is web based it's required that we have a way to embed a web browser into the game client.
So given all of that, what's a logical system for us to use? We could certainly build a custom system and embed lua for example. Or we could license a 3rd party library like Scaleform and use Actionscript.
Or we could do the obvious thing and simply use a web browser as the UI system. So that's what we've chosen to do. Basically the client is a transparent web browser (webkit) window over the top of an OpenGL context. All of the front end UI and the top level game UI is being written in Javascript. Javascript while not my favorite language by any stretch has the advantage of being the most popular language on earth. It has suites of tools dedicated to it. It's got a fairly decent JIT.
So the basic idea here is that the engine exposes a set of javascript interfaces. The web browser draws all of the UI elements and also controls issuing orders, selection etc. By exposing more interfaces we can give the javascript more control and I intend to expose more than we actually use. The planetary editor is also written the same way which means it's extensible by the community as well. In fact the planetary editor is the first real UI we are doing with the system.
Early shot of some planet editor UI. Please don't consider this a style guide for the UI as this is all preliminary in terms of look and feel. Normally we would never show stuff this early but the rules have changed due to Kickstarter. The functionality in this interface will probably change dramatically over time etc etc disclaimer etc.
Overall I'm happy with this decision so far and we've already got this running on Windows/MacOS/Linux. Over the medium term I do still have some concerns about performance and how sick of a lanuage js is. In reality though I think this is going to be the way that many games do UI going forward as the web becomes ubiquitos.
I'm going to start a thread on our Forum to discuss this.
