ZDoom

I am expecting you'll be doing it entirely your way -- a good thing too. I'm loving what we have so far for zscript. I'm just curious how it'll look like, though I reckon you don't have any plans down for it yet until after you start on it.

To be honest I never liked and used sbar, I always make my hud with acs, its simple and it works just fine.


Maybe if sbar could be just pure acs I'd be happy ( but idc with some extra functions to scale stuff correctly and maybe some new types of script that are executed when you are viewing a specific class name

ibm5155 wrote:its simple and it works just fine.

It's not simple and it doesn't work fine. ACS huds provide a suboptimal user experience because they are not part of normal engine flow.

I have found SBARINFO useful and produced some HUDs that I'm happy with and, clearly, some people have done some very advanced stuff with it. However, I have always found that it felt "non-standard". There's just something about the syntax and the way it hangs together that makes it feel unlike most of the other control lumps in ZDoom. So it would be nice to have a system that felt like a natural extension of the other systems rather than a stand-alone thing that you have to learn independently to the other ways of doing things.

SBARINFO is/was perfect if you didn't mind sticking to a preset template or design... but if you wanted to do anything more personalized or to fit a certain look/aesthetic (like animated stuff, non-standard positioning, what-have-you), ACS and HudMessage abuse-fuckery was more preferable.

Hopefully with full scriptification of the status bar and 2D stuff, finally authors can do things the correct and elegant way, and have as much power as they'd need.

Does that mean I'll have to use ACS for custom HUDs in the meantime?* :-P

All joking aside, I can live with SBARINFO being replaced. Personally, it was a hell of a mess to deal with anyway.

*(or will that method become deprecated as well?)

Well, Graf is going to make HudMessage available from ACS sometime later down the road.

Some sort of improvement/alternative to the HUDMessage syntax would be nice too. I have to check the docs almost every time I use HUDMessage.

The HUDMessage stuff as implemented needs to be dumped in the deepest bowels of hell, it's the epitome of insanity. I hope I can figure out what to do with it later.

Wouldn't be surprised if you actually made it part of the new ZSCRIPTBAR capabilities since that's where it seems most likely to belong.

For what it's worth, the plan from the beginning was to replace it with ZScript when the time came. For those looking for the simplicity offered it would be easy enough to make a library with a similar feature set.

I'm curious on how you would even attack cleaning the parser since I haven't had a whole lot of success on figuring that out, and I have thought about it quite a bit. I do have something in my git stash that simplified parsing of conditionals a little (recursion vs looping), which while a little more structured doesn't change much overall. I really didn't see SBarInfo being the long term solution that it became and it unfortunately shows.

No idea yet, but I guess the best way would be prototyping the various commands and run them through a generic parser, something like the property parser for DECORATE.

Yes please! I'd like to stop using ACS for my HUDs because SBARINFO doesn't have the features I need.

Judging by the more recent replies to this thread, I'm looking forward to every mod that uses SBARINFO simultaneously breaking as one when the parser is inevitably taken to pasture.

Graf Zahl wrote:The HUDMessage stuff as implemented needs to be dumped in the deepest bowels of hell, it's the epitome of insanity. I hope I can figure out what to do with it later.

You have no idea how good this is to hear. I don't care if it'll take a long time, just that it's happening at some point is a huge relief.