World of Tanks Game User Interface Evolution – Part II

Part Ilink

Source: http://habrahabr.ru/company/wargaming/blog/228309/ (via LJ user cadmi)

Pre-release Period – Transferring to Scaleform

Scaleform proposed to use Flash to develop the GUI. Basically, the solutio consisted of three parts:

- customized implementation of the Flash Player, possible to insert into the game client
- set of tools to export SWF into specialized format
- CLIK component library – a set of standard UI components and classes in order to accelerate the development

In the Fall of 2009, a license was purchased and a new phase of GUI development started. At first, everything looked very promising – the Flash development process was developed for years and there were many developers who knew and liked this process. However, it turned out that the job market situation in Belarus was such that the majority of the Flash developers already worked on interesting and “big” projects and to quickly find and hire good people was complicated.

Because of that, the entire staff of the GUI department started to quickly learn Flash (until that point, they worked with php, Java and were doing web development). They learned and started working with ActionScript 2, because at that point, Scaleform did not support ActionScript 3 yet. This is what we got as first results:

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Independence Day Wallpaper

Hello everyone,

first and foremost, happy Independence Day to the American readers! Now, World of Tanks for Xbox360 prepared a special wallpaper to commemorate the event. And it’s… well, very American (the eagles are a nice touch).

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You can get it in various resolutions below the line. It’s clear that the Xbox version is targetted mostly on western audience, specifically Americans. It’s not a bad thing actually, targetting specific audience helps selling the game after all…

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Straight Outta Supertest – 9.2 New Medals

Source: http://world-of-ru.livejournal.com/3374618.html

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Please note that the official names of the medals are not known, only the internal file names (as written under the icons)

For team battles:

battleTested – awarded for the number of awards from team battles (SS: as in, if you get some number of medals from TB, you get this award), in multiple ranks
bruteForceMedal – for 10 times destroying the enemy by ramming
guerrillaMedal – for 10 times destroying the enemy without being spotted, the enemy has to be in your line of sight
infiltratorMedal – for getting 1000 base capture points, points only count when the battle ends with base capture
prematureDetonationMedal – for destroying the enemy by ammorack explosion 10 times
sentinelMedal – for getting 1000 base defense points, points count only in victorious battles

For CW:

Rotmistrov’s Medal – awarded for the amount of battles played in CW mode, in multiple ranks

World of Tanks Game User Interface Evolution – Part I

Source: http://habrahabr.ru/company/wargaming/blog/228309/ (via LJ user cadmi)

Hello everyone,

an interesting article was published on the Wargaming… I don’t know, blog?, about the evolution of the World of Tanks GUI. Now, it’s mostly aimed at programmers, so I hope I will get the translations right, but I think it is potentially interesting for everyone. If you spot any mistakes or wrong terms, please let me know in comments.

Also, it’s not a word for word translations, more like an excerpt of how the GUI evolved over time. The author of the post worked in Wargaming GUI Programming department for 2,5 years and wanted to sum his past experience with the GUI itself.

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First Steps

The first steps consisted of using the tools of BigWorld itself. The idea of the project was born in December 2008 – the original idea was in fact to make a MMO with elves and orcs (that’s where the models from the “orc vs elves” trailer came from), but after thinking it through, the devs decided to do tanks instead. The game was made using the BigWorld engine, which had its own set of tools for creating the GUI. WG programmers followed the “easiest path” and made the first interface based on the BW tools GUI.

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