Silent Hunter 4 – Interface

Silent Hunter is a special type of game, in which the player makes great use of the 2D interface by using the mouse and the keyboard. You just can’t play Silent Hunter with a joystick. This means we had to work heavily on the game interface.

New additions

The interface is very scalable and can run in any resolution greater than 1024*768. Basically, the available screen resolutions reported by DirectX are only a restriction to the game.

This means the game can run at any aspect ratio, on any monitor: 4:3, 5:4, 16:9, 16:10 etc. So, go ahead and buy the HD monitor you want, Silent Hunter 4 will make full use of it.  We tested the game and looks great on 37” HD monitors.

The 2D menu engine now has integrated animations that allows for auto hiding (in the HUD, museum and periscope). The player can now configure the interface by hiding the unnecessary items:

The resizing of items (for the dials in the HUD) is used to provide more information to the player when is needed. When changing the submarine’s course, the dial increases in size to clearly see the bearings written on it. This is even more useful when playing in HD resolutions:

More complex, in game windows-like controls

The new interface makes use of lists that can contain any 2D object, including combo boxes that each one has a new list of its own.

The designers can create HTML like mission descriptions displayed directly in the game, containing texts and images that can be scrolled. You can’t see this in many games.

These features allow the designers to imagine interfaces not possible before and eliminate cluttered screens that damage the gameplay.

Customizable interface

Parts of the interface are created at runtime, based on text files that can be easily modified by designers (and by the players, to create MODS J):

By

Mihai Maerean