This week I have been finishing up the conversion over to a more global UI system for the most frequently needed menus.

This means the ‘ESC’ key will no longer auto quit what you are doing! Instead, a nice menu will pop up giving you a few options. Most exciting of those options is the actual options menu it’s self! It’s amazingly helpful to be able to toggle graphic options while inside a level and seeing the benefits in real time. You can adjust key bindings, volume settings, and anything that is in the current options menu at any time now!

Another interesting button is the help option. The help screen is still being worked out [there is a great discussion on it!], but the goal is to provide most of the value of this page inside of the game itself. The goal is to help guide players through the most complicated aspects of MAV so they can spend more time playing the game and not having to search for answers.

I also added a few creature comforts like a connecting screen when joining multiplayer games. I am looking to address UI support for none 16:9 screens and resolutions less than 1080p soon.

Overall, I have been chugging through the UI work at a nice pace and have been looking into a lot of long term design tasks. If you want to help shape the conversation, you should join the weekly discussion threads!

Well, that is all I have for this week! I would love to hear feedback about the help screen in the comments or in the forums!