Hirato's blog

As some of you may know, I have recently finished writing exams for this semester, so I now have a chance to write about a few things.

Some of you may also know that for the past few years, sandbox has shipped with an alternative UI system, otherwise referred to as newui. It's actual name is UI, and we will be referring to is as such from now on. This UI was originally written for a commercial game named bloodtoll and according to neal, it has diverged significantly from that point.

Compared to 3dgui, the current default, UI offers far more flexibility when it comes to defining the appearance, layout and actions of the elements as well as general larger variety of interesting and unique elements. With that said it lacks several elements we desire, contains several dozen bugs and coupled with the fact that pretty much no one knew how to use it 2 years ago really stymied its adoption.

Some of you may remember a screenshot I posted on moddb back in 2010 when graphitemaster joined us temporarily and revived interest in UI (he got it working again too, so hi-five for that).
This renewed interest in the system for some time and this was enough for us to learn how it worked, fix a bunch of bugs and document it as well as we could on the wiki.

I've mentioned to Mike that I'd like to start a developer's blog and suffice to say, here we are.

I've been the head (and pretty much only) coder around here for years, and before that I've spent a lot of time scripting and mapping in the cube 2 community. In effect I'm a walking encyclopedia on sandbox and most of its internals.

So this is going to be the devblog, I'm going to take this opportunity to inform you of what's happening behind the scenes in sandbox development, the new features, how they work, the rationale behind them, weird and significant bugfixes, our projects, our needs and assorted other cool things we get up to in the realms of sandbox.
By doing this I hope to garner some interest from potential contributors as well as pass off some of my knowledge to the community.

I unfortunately do not have anything prepared plus I've been somewhat swamped with real life obligations, but I will reveal two things.

Firstly, we have decided to prepare a 2.7.1 point-release, it should be released within the next few weeks and if my exam time table permits, I will spend a few posts talking about the changes since 2.7.0

As for the second item, I really shouldn't spoil it, but we're planning a nice surprise for everyone when 2.7.1 comes out. I will tell you it's been rather popular demand recently ;)

Tune in next time for some proper devblog'in ;)