Week 2 Day 6 - Main Menus, Settings Menus, and Game Lobbies, Oh my!

Today we exclusively worked on menus.  We were having problems previously with how we were trying to implement our menus.  Before we were having a problem in switching how things were being drawn in our OnGui function.  This function is actually called twice, once for figuring out where everything should be drawn, and the second time for drawing it.  Originally, we were changing how things were to be drawn in that function, so that each frame it was trying to draw two different things.  We now a menu manager, which is different from our proposal.  With this new system, we are always drawing the same thing during any particular frame.

We were also encountering a problem in which the previous menu screen wasn't being cleared when switching menus.  This resulting in menu buttons and screen objects being drawn on top of one another.  This is because without a camera in the scene the screen would never be flushed.  So we added a 'dummy' camera to sit in our scene while we navigated the menus, so that we could appropriately clear previous menus and draw new ones.  This camera will allow us to provide an appropriate backdrop for the menus in the future.

After we got this system set up, and working for the main menu, we split into working on two different menus.  Jon worked on the Settings menu while Zach worked on the Game Lobby menu (we decided who would work on which with the roll of a die).

We now have a basic settings menu containing multiple sliders and toggles allowing the user to change their preferences such as inversion, sensitivity, and field of view.  We also have a basic game lobby menu that contains multiple placeholders that may or may not change as we make them actually useful.

Above is shown two clients connecting to one another in the game lobby screen.  In the bottom left you can see a text box that the user can type into.  When they press enter the message is sent to every client connected, and added to a list of messages.  That list is printed above the text box, as you can see on both clients above.  We still need to add a specific box for the messages to appear in, along with a scroll bar so that the messages do not continue off screen.

Due to more Christmas Festivities this weekend, we will not be able to work on Dias again until Monday.  We will work on the following goals starting Monday:

1. Get Dias to the point at which we can enter a game from the game lobby.
2. Basic HUD.
3. Pause menu.
4. Start working on teams.