Dev Blog #1 - All About U and I.

Editor's Note: Whilst we were moving everything from the forums to the blog, we saw that some of the images were missing from the post, so we're removing them from the post here. Sorry about that folks.

Welcome to the first official Limelight development blog, I'll be this evening's entertainment. We're starting with a New Year's resolution to keep the community more informed as to what we have in store for future updates and changes to the gamemode. Think less of a boring lecture about the technical magic @Doctor Internet performs to fix my screwups and more like show and tell when you were a kid. You know, when that one kid would always have the coolest stuff to bring in and you just sat there jealous with a pet rock. Or was that just me? Anyway the point is we want to give you small sampling of what we're working on and have you saying "Damn that's cool, now when can I play with it?"

For now there's no set schedule on these (you guys know how we are with schedules) but as soon as someone from development has something cool to show we'll be sure to get it here first.

Orange You Glad We're Now Blue?

As many of you have noticed Limelight went through a bit of a color change the past week with some roughening up from the community. This was to be expected as orange had been the color of our community for quite some time but we felt it was time to grow and change a little. For now our forums have transitioned to steel before we begin our final departure to a new design. When will that be? We have no ETA as of now as we have a few other projects we'd like to complete before I'm released from my chains fully available to start on it.

The new branding we put into place was to ensure that going forward Limelight had a distinct, solid look to better guide our developers and media team when implementing it. We know some of you have your doubts still but we haven't given up on winning you over.

The U and I of User Interface

For those of you who don't know I'm pretty handicapped when it comes to being able to implement content directly in-game. Most of my designing and coding usually had to be recreated by some poor soul as we've seen with the current HUD and F1 menu. Luckily @Mathias has a potential cure to allow me to be of better service to the team and, you know, not get fired. We won't go into the dirty details but the goal is to use web-based languages to allow me to directly create the front-end designs of our interfaces that can be easy moved to in-game..

TLDR; Interfaces will look prettier and take less time to develop, a major win-win.

Our first challenge has been to redesign the HUD so it stands out as a unique part of the gamemode. Something that's there when you really need it but still out of the way and not obstructing your view. This hasn't been the easiest issue to tackle and I've already trashed 5 prior designs before getting to where we are today.

There was a lot of heavy inspiration from games such as Destiny, The Division, and Arma to create a HUD that stands out from the common Gmod HUDs we've all seen before. It was important to build it in a modular sense so that when certain elements we're unneeded they could simply be hidden away. Don't have any props spawned? Then no need to display a prop limit counter. The same applies to armor (kevlar), oxygen levels, and flashlight battery. We feel the icons are fairly straightforward to what they represent and help us save valuable screen space by keep descriptor text off of it. And in case you were wondering, top bar is health and bottom bar is stamina.

A proper speedometer and detailed information about your vehicle was also something we knew had to be done in the new HUD as the current one was never finished. For that we knew we wanted to mirror the same design as the left and keep everything as minimal and on a needed basis only.

As you can see the design has been mirrored over for a digital speedometer and some important information about your vehicle. There is of course your fuel meter as well as a door locked/unlocked indicator and a red car icon appearing if your car is turned off with the /engineoff command. Replacing a heathbar for your vehicle is a check engine light that will turn on when your car's health is low. Just like real life you can sometimes drive some time with the light on, but it'd be best to get something like that checked out by a qualified mechanic.

Can I get a 10-101 on a Police Database?

We've heard the frustration over the current state of the police database and have made it one of our priorities to get finished as soon as we can. We've redesigned the database from the ground up (minus the case).

That's all I got for now! These are a few of the projects that I'm working heavily on and hope we've given the community a glimpse at how we're going about solving the issues that are important to you. Please note that everything above is subject to change (you know how these things are) but the general ideas and structures they're built around will very much stay the same.

Until next time, Noble out.