Black Box: The Appearance Hud

About a week ago, the HUD portion of the project reached it's 'feature complete' state.

In theory.

I turned to my friend and mentioned that essentially, this was all the engine I would need to build a set of color-changing shoes. Just the hud, and the buttons and scripts I'd already made. Her response was "prove it".

And so, for the last week or two, I've spent most of my time taking a pair of ready-made shoes, and adding customized ER textures and my shiny new HUD system. Now, this is something that a lot of stores do. There's a lot of high-quality pre-fabricated content out there. You purchase a resale license, and then you take their often plain, white model, and turn it into something unique and desirable. The most fun of the whole project was making the latexxy textures for the boots. I had a blast doing it, and really feel good about the end result.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Work in Progress.. final product may vary slightly.[/caption]

The harder part was yet to come. Taking this mishmash pile of prims and buttons that I called a "working hud", and actually turning it into something not just usable, but attractive, and hopefully user friendly. This meant several days of designing button graphics, anguishing over how best to communicate "pushing this button does this thing". And on top of all of that, I had to resize and position the buttons so they'd all fit on the HUD in attractive, and somewhat balanced arrangements. And I also had to create a few new buttons along the way that I hadn't anticipated needing during the main scripting phase. (like a "minimize hud" button). All while keeping an eye on memory usage, and making sure the script had enough free memory to work without crashing.

Today I put the logos on the HUD. That's the last difficult step really. From here on out, it's the standard sort of routine.. checking permissions, removing certain debugging messages, making sure that all the parts are ready to be sold.. then putting them into a box, and creating vendor art.. choosing a price, etc. Clean up, set up, etc.

I can't offer you a timeframe when these boots will be all finished and finally up for sale.. there's some RL things I need to handle in the next couple of days.. and that will surely mess with my availability. But you can look for them soon.