Thanks all, hope to have the alpha 2 version ready in 3 days.
B25, the tdc was originally on the left of the screen. I decided at the last second to move it to the right (and also mirroring the layout) because on 4:3 resolutions it covered the vertical periscope marks. I'll put the torpedo settings on the left since they don't need to be constantly up. Since all the items have scalable and relative size and position, they should be easy to move from one position to the other by simply making an offset or, better, playing with the parent position ratio. You only need to move the 0x26030000 object. Yet some items will behave incorrectly because the Pos and Line values will not all be correct. For example, if I move the 0x26030000 object 1 pixel to the right, I need to remake the Line position for all it's children to avoid any problems. And there are about 50 of them
. And scaling is done just by changing the size of the main group (0x26030000).
BUT, there's always a BUT...
Problem nr1.: make sure that this file
data/menu/gui/layout/bgr00.tga is transparent. I think yours is white and NOT transparent. It's used as an image for all invisible (but clickable) dials. I'll make a new one, so it won't be a problem anymore, I had no idea that TMO has a different bgr00.tga file...
Problem nr2: the TDC autoupdate button is not a button, it's a dial. The red/green bulb is not a bulb, it's a needle. It's center is, in my version, waaay to the right, somewhere above the bearing dial. When you click it, it rotates 180 degrees. The red bulb which was just offscreen, now moves into the correct position and the green bulb moves outside the screen
. SO if you move the TDC to the left of the screen, you'll have to rework the needle to make the unwanted bulb go offscreen to the left, not to the right (just move the needle to the left, by an equal ammount of pixels to it's width).
Problem Nr3: this is where it hurts... at least it hurt me on my calculations. All the images in the game are made for 1024x768 resolution. The game dodges this problem on higher resolution by not scaling up the items (not all of them, just look how bad the periscope background looks at high res). But as you can see, my panel looks the same at any resolution (including widescreen). That's because the game stretches my images (I used 1 1 scaling values for all my items). I tried at first to use "1024x768" image but at high resolutions (I'm using 1920x1200) it looked like krap. So instead, I used 1920x1200 image files (cropped of course) so that they look best and unpixelated at the maximum resolution and are scaled down for the lower ones by the game, with an acceptable loss of information. My items have the exact same size in pixels as the image parts themselves multiplied by 0.64 (1024/1920=0.64). This way, even at 1024x768, the dials are still readable. But if you scale the thing down even by 10%, the game will have to rescale an already rescaled image... you won't be able to read them anymore at low resolution. In other words, the size is not some designer wish, it's demanded by readability
Just to make you understand, I had to make the dials 5% bigger at one point because the white text on the AOB dial was completely blurred at 1024x768. And to either move or scale it, requires reworking the image files too. I'm not talking about "Image size" in photoshop, I'm talking about modifying 3d objects and rerendering and then reworking each item in the menu.ini file. Not an option for me, at least at this stage.