Quake One - Overlay as Menu

[Ranger366]

Hello friends,
i recently came back to PC Engine coding for Quake, everything begun with one simple fix... And something let me think about the HL Menu, because the original Quake Menu is not really the best at all.
Valve used for Half-Life's Menu one Overlay



And i asked me if this is possible in the GLQuake Engine on C, i know that there are Dialogues/Forms ("Starting Quake..."), a little bit VB6 like Interface at editing, but its not possible to realize this with that. Does someone know howto makes such like this Overlay? such Visual basic 6 like. Its interesting for me, because this can be enhanced.

Just a question, i hope this is interesting for someone else here too...

[Spike]

[Ranger366]

[Spike]

a window handle is a window handle. you can pass them around as commandline arguments, and use them for your child app's parent window (this is how the preview of screensavers work).
Modify an engine to use that window handle for a parent window and voila, engine embedded in a VB6 app.
Better to use a DLL though. Just don't make it an ActiveX one. In practical terms, its easier to make the engine the DLL and the vb6 app the exe, as VB is a bit easier to interface with that way around.
Just make any UI-exposed functions be exported from your DLL and directly call them in VB, same as any windows api function.
But VB sucks. :P

VB6+PSP? no chance. Not going to happen.

Frankly, halflife having to do a mode switch every time you want to go to the menu is lame and slow.

[Ranger366]

[mh]

You can do it in .NET as well, or anything else that understands what a HWND is.

But Spike is absolutely bang on about that mode switch. I can just picture the Valve designers meeting: "we've got a cool game but I don't think we've done enough things to piss off the player in it yet." "Howabout displaying 'loading' for a few seconds every time you so much as enter a new room or turn a corner?" "Been done before, but it's always good for a giggle. OK, it's in. Anyone else?" "I KNOW! What about a mode switch every time you enter the menu?" "Brilliant! That'll have them swearing at their monitors in no time at all! Well done, have a bonus!"

[Ranger366]

[Spike]

Not sure how well VB will respond to it. Should be okay to use that in Quake though (Actually use the argument in CreateWindowEx).

[Ranger366]