Yet another IwGame Engine UI Progress Update

Not had a great deal of spare time to spend on the UI this week but did manage to get a few cool things in there including:

  • Scrolling grids
  • Scrolling list boxes
  • Horizontal list boxes
  • 9-patch brushes
  • Child element sizing based on percentage of parent
  • Child clipping
  • Grid per column bindings
  • Dynamic resizing of elements, grids and list boxes will automatically re-layout child elements to make use of extra space
  • UI elements can allow touch events to bubble up to parent elements allowing them to also receive the same events
  • Tidied up the UI input system
  • 4 parameter skewing – See the wonky text on the large and small buttons for an example

Heres a quick screen shot showing the current UI demo:

More Advanced IwGame Engine UI Screen Shot
More Advanced IwGame Engine UI Screen Shot

Those frogs look happy to be sat in that list box like that 🙂

And here’s a new and better video showing the new UI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhtT_e5u8gU

I hope to spend a few additional weeks on implementing more UI controls such as sliders and tab vies etc.. before we released 0.35.

Luck Bubbles – Why some are luckier than others

Last year I was sat in the garden on the swing in the blazing son, relaxing and thinking up nonsense. I happened to think  back to a chat I had with my father some years before where he said that “if there was no bad luck in the Universe then he would have no luck at all”, I found the comment quite amusing at the time. However, years later after suffering at the hands of rotten luck for a while it got me to thinking about why some are lucky and some are not.

My mind is a strange one and loves a thinking challenge, so it began running through hundreds of possible theories. One theory I quite liked was the “Luck Bubbles” theory (not an official theory as far as I know). In this theory, Luck Bubbles are basically areas of luck that exist in 4-dimensional space-time. They float around and are attracted to positive thoughts / energies. If an area at a specific time has a particularly strong attraction then Luck Bubbles will congregate there for a while.

Luck Bubbles change the nature of positive chance events in the area that they cover, being stronger towards their centre and tapering off towards the edges. Conversely bad luck bubbles also exist in this theory which have the exact opposite affect of good luck bubbles tending to congregate around negative energies / thoughts.

So maybe luck is a state of mind? Positive thoughts could lead to better luck. Next time you put the lottery on or release a new app, think positive just in case.

Well, I’m off to travel the globe tossing a coin to test my theory 😀