OK so it seems no one wants the HP bar (i personally wasn't over impressed with it myself but thought someone may want it) so i have scrapped that idea,
So far all i have done is move it to the bottom of the screen, i can move things to wherever i want them (only on the background so far, i haven't got the attack menu's sorted yet but that's why this is called a WIP) but there are a couple of small problems,
1 - I can't seem to move the Names of the characters over to the right (they will only go so far as the barriers boxes) so they will need to be kept on the left unless someone else knows how to do this.
2 - I can move the barriers slots anywhere but the problem with this is that when the attack command box comes up the barrier bars disappear, so if i move them over to the right you will keep seeing them appear and disappear everytime the battle commands come up.
Also it does appear i forgot about the help bar (i don't use it so i forgot about it) so i will have to work on this at some point but i think moving the battle commands comes before this since i would only be able to move the bar down very far until the battle commands are lower (or do you people think i should leave the battle commands and help bar where they are and only move the status ?)
Woah man!! That looks great! I don't know if its possible but do you remember in ff8 and ff9 when you can make the battle bar disappear for boost?? That's my suggestion..
EDIT:I just remembered tekken when I saw that hp bar.
I can make the whole bar disappear so all your left with is the battle commands but i can only make them disappear, i cant make it like FF8 where you press a button to make them appear and disappear (i could add this to the trainer though since it may be possible that way),
Hahahahahaha yeah it reminds me a bit of the old tekken games
Yep, it sure it's getting pretty nice!
Think the most it can be done with the HP is to make it similar to the MP so that some extra space can be saved (that plus the 2 in 1 time+limit would really save a lot of space), but with the whole bar transparent those info's do not get in the way at all.
I can do this but if i made it like HP it would make the game more difficult in places (like Kudistos Megistos said about the battle arena) and i can add double limit and time bars but i think i will make that the second release, for the first release i want to try and keep to the original battle interface
With the HP bar (same goes for MP) I think it should stay original or vanish completely. The thick on the side deal looks too clunky. Like how the background is invisible. I would like for the limit and ATB bars to look better if someone wants to take a crack at that.
I have given up on the HP bar, And i may get rid of it completely for the second release,
Well the limit and time bars are a tex format and i suck at editing picture's, but i can make it look like the barrier bars so they look neater.
Looks like the animation command that makes the white flash quad needs to be extended to the bottom of the screen.
The "Eye opener" at the start of battle could also stand to be extended too
Thanks for the info halkun i will look into this, is the "Eye opener" your name for it or it's correct name ? i have never heard it called this before but it sounds good.
Anything like this would work waaaaay better than the original:
As for barrier gauges, they could be moved in place of the names when they are active to avoid that visual area to be too crowded with indicators.
well it may be possible to do something like this but as i said above i have yet to find a way of moving the character names to the right (well that far to the right, i can move them up to a point), But i could make the limit and time bar into 1 like in the YAMP patch and then delete the overall HP and the / and the and HP+MP bars and move what's left over all to the right to make it close to that, I will have to think more on this.
I'm not a fan of the HP gauges either (they take too much screen space IMO, and it reminds me of FFXIII *shrugs*), but the transparent background is awesome. I'd sure love to know how to do it in my game
I think making the gauges (time, barrier, limit, HP & MP) semi-transparent as well would be even better. Or as Furzball said, remaking them completely. I, for one, wouldn't be mad if the HP and MP bars were removed. Anyways, one thing FFVII did right is the maxHP being displayed. I hate the fact that you need to enter the menu to see it, in both FFVIII and FFIX.
EDIT :
Oh yeah, and the indications NAME, HP, MP and TIME should perhaps be removed. They're useless (especially NAME and TIME).
EDIT 2 :
I don't know how to edit the menu, but I can use Photoshop. Here is how it would look with my ideas. Not sure if all of this is doable :
Transparency could proably be added by editing the TEX files but i am not a very good picture editor so someone else would have to do it, i believe the bars are kept in the menu_us.lgp,
anyway it does seem possible,
And i will proably remove NAME,HP,MP,TIME,LIMIT for the second patch (for the first i want it to be like the original)
Lose the details like name, hp, limit, barrier, atb, etc.
Or maybe something like this could be done:
Where the limit bar goes under HP and MP.
Plus the action window could appear in that position, etc.
A world of oportunities has just emerged.
edit:
Or, re-ordering it like:
NAME | HP/MP | Barrier/MBarrier | Limit/ATB
Using the "double bars" (from barriers) for the last two.
well i have the battle command box Co-ords for X and Y axis but just moving the box isn't enough, i need to find the location of all the text in them, it really will be a lot of work so i want to try and get at least the battle interface status's working first before i attempt anything with the battle command box.
Also another problem is that the battle command box really does need to be over the barrier bars, the reason for this is that the barrier bars disappear when the battle command comes up, so if i move the barrier bars away from the battle commaned menu it looks really odd.
I may need to come up with a method to keep the barrier bars onscreen with the battle command menu to get around this.
Or, re-ordering it like:
NAME | HP/MP | Barrier/MBarrier | Limit/ATB
Using the "double bars" (from barriers) for the last two.
I like that idea. If possible, i second it (so long as it works with the TA patch )
I will try looking into a way of keeping the barriers onscreen while the battle command window is up, if not it really looks odd, i tested it this morning and they keep flashing on and off everytime the battle commands come up.
I don't see why it won't work with the TA patch but i will install the TA patch before i release this to see if it will work or not.
very nice, i can't wait to see where this leads. i have a few suggestions.
Name Section
for this i only have one suggestion and that is to lose the Title, as armorvil suggests
Barrier section.
perhaps you can do one bar, and for magic use a green and for physical use a blue (or any two colors), since ff7 supports some transparency i would set there alpha to like 50% and lose the border, that way if they are not active they take up no space also by using the transparency you would be making a third color when both are active. or keep the double bars but lose the border so again when there is no barrier the area is empty.
hp/mp
i am not a fan of the hp/mp bars when there are no numbers. i think that this will be the hardest area to do only because there are a million ways you can do it each no better then the other.
limit/atb
combine them in to a two high block and drop the borders
I haven't found how to make things transparent yet but i believe the bars for limit,time,barriers are already transparent but the background is not so it is possible to just remove the background to make them transparent but this would mean you have no idea when they are full or empty because all that would be their is a bar, someone could make a bar with only a beginning and a end and that would probably work but this would need someone better and picture editing then myself (i am doing all of this by editing the EXE with very basic ASM and i am not touching any other files)
I may be able to do something like removing the outside borders if i made a double limit and time box, i will have to look into that.
I'd very much like to see the battle interface left intact and just moved to the bottom. If you release this, can you release multiple versions, some with transparency, some without, and some with all the features left and some with various features removed?
Yeah this is a good idea, i will make a first patch with the original layout (like in the picture above), and then make a second one with some of the idea's that have been posted here to try and make a different layout,
do you think i should leave the battle menu where it is to save any trouble that may be caused by moving it or do you think i should try lowering that as well ? the reason i ask is that it will proably take a lot of work to make the command window since if i move one will all the other windows work and will they look out of place and will they glitch (plus it would take a long time to find the values for every single thing in the command window)
Well, this best way to add this would be to make it part of Aali's driver, or a plugin for it.
If they talk it out and make it part of it, I'm 100% the menu wont have any changes in terms of HP, Barrier (...) positioning as that is not the objective of the driver at all.
If it's released as a plugin it can probably accept parameters too to move the stuff around a little.
But this is just me guessing, plus there is still the animation area limit problem to fix first, so 1 thing at a time.
Well if Aali could add this to his driver that would be great (it would save a lot of time, and wouldn't require any kind of separate patch, plus i get the feeling Aali may be able to do a better job of the transparency then me since he understands the code a lot better then i).
I am going to look into the animation area problem soon (and the "Eye Opener") although i am not sure if i can fix it.
remove the words limit as well, and incorporate into the actual limit bar itself. Should be easily done by modifying the PNGs. It would be neat if it could be pushed into the corner, but i dont know if that is even possible. I'm really liking what has been shown so far.
Well i suppose the word LIMIT could be put into the limit bar itself but this would require editing the btl_win files in menu_us.lgp which is where the limit bars are kept, but i am sure you or anyone who knows a bit about picture editing could do it (just don't look at me for that)
But pushing the info into the corner is defiantly possible and is a quite interesting idea, i may look into this (i only have it set where i have it on that picture and those video's for my own personal preference), i could even move the info closer together but i wasn't sure on this because it may look a little squashed up.
Only partially related, but where are the default window color digits stored in vanilla FF7?
I am not sure, i never actually found the colour digits, I did once find some of the in-game menu and for the text on the battle command window but i have no idea where the default window colour digits are stored, sorry