Any good ideas for making status bars

[cannonball]

I am a complete noob to this part of doom editing so I might have just missed something with this. I was wondering whether there are any good programmes to use to make new custom status bars and how you go about making one as I've looked around for advice and haven't found much luck.

[Gez]

By making a status bar, do you mean reskinning the classic Doom one; or scripting a brand-new one for an advanced port which allows such a thing to be done?

[cannonball]

reskinning the classic doom one.

[printz]

Aluminium-textured or flat seems to be trendy these days when it comes to widgets. Doom 3 chose flat.

[Kappes Buur]

The best way to learn how to make a statusbar is by loading a pwad into Slade3 and dissecting it:











As you can see, they all follow a common pattern.
To change an existing one or creating a new one, use something like:
GIMP, PaintdotNet, Paint Shop Pro, etc

[printz]

Who created the Lost_in_time status bar? I see it in lots of classic megawads.

[Memfis]

Either Andy Chen or Claude Martins, the authors of INVADE1.

[cannonball]

Here is my first attempt, pretty crappy probably

[Nevanos]

Personally I think it's alright, using all appropriate colours making it easy to read. Pretty cool! :)

[esselfortium]

Yeah, it's nice and readable -- the backdrop is low-contrast and doesn't get in the way of the text.

There are a couple of minor issues I've noticed with it:

- "ARMS" text isn't in the same font as the other orange label text.
- Some of the arms numbers are off-centered from their backdrop.
- The light gray boxes for the keys visibly repeat, with the light dot on the left particularly standing out. Varying the three of them a bit would look more natural.

This last one is less simple, and also applies to at least one or two of the statusbars Kappes posted:

- The font antialiasing on the orange text makes the letters a bit blurry -- unfortunately this is hard to avoid in Doom-resolution graphics, without either avoiding the antialiasing altogether, or learning to pixel it in by hand to have smooth edges while retaining crispness and definition. Ptoing really got on my case about this a year or so ago regarding a lot of the text in BTSX's resources, so I had to learn :)

Anyway, it's certainly basic, but it's easy on the eyes, looks pleasant enough, and does its job of presenting the player stats clearly. Nice work.

[40oz]

Never really noticed until this thread that the Ammo and Armor numbers are horribly uncentered. Wish I had taken that into account when I made my status bar for uu2.

EDIT: well actually i guess not depending on how many digits worth of ammo you've got. disregard this post