Full(screen) TRAUMA

At this rate, it’s almost a wonder when I actually manage to get something done for TRAUMA. But there is some progress after all and I will eventually get there. First of all, I was able to apply some spelling / wording suggestions from Julia Zaadstra (a friend of mine) and Igor Hardy. The quality of the subtitles has improved greatly and I greatly appreciate both of them helping me that much.

But that’s not all. I have been also working with TRAUMA’s musician, Martin Straka to finalize the sound in the game. Martin has provided me with the final tweaks for the volume levels. On his suggestion, I also implemented a system to cross-fade different background music tracks into each other. The game sound pretty much finished now.

Finally, I have implemented one feature that was requested by a lot of beta testers. The game can be played in full-screen now. This is something I picked up from my friend Yu-Chung Chen. He discovered that Flash actually has some pretty cool hardware-based full-screen features. The problem I couldn’t pull a real full-screen mode until now was because I am using the flash-based 3D engine Papervision3D. Because this engine software-based, it rapidly loses performance with increased resolution. By upscaling the game using Hardware, I can keep the game running at the same resolution. Of course, upscaling doesn’t look that great. But it is a solution if the game looks too small on a screen with high pixel density.

Implementing the full-screen function meant I had to add a full-screen button as well. This caused a small interface design dilemma. It made sense to put it into the control panel at the bottom. But on that panel, there was already a button to show “sound settings”. Pressing that button would make sliders appear on the right next to it. So I couldn’t add the full-screen button on the right of the “sound settings” button. But then, I couldn’t put it on the left either. It would put the full-screen button between the main volume slider and the “sound settings” button. The two clearly belong together.

The full-screen button slides to the right when the user presses the “sound settings” button.

My solution was to put the full-screen button on the right anyway and make it slide all the way to the right if the user presses the “sound settings” button. I’m not perfectly happy with this solution but it will do for now.

I’m slowly eating my way through the to-do list. It feels quite liberating to get all those problems out of the way, that were nagging on me. I might even take a few days off to power trough and finally get it done.