Damn I like that spin effect.

You spin me round right round like a record baby

That's so wicked... I love the little spinny animations.

I have to admit, I like your radial menus even better than the ones used in Neverwinter Nights. Reminds me of the old Square action RPG's in the "Secret Of ..." series.

Why thank you Etherstar =)

Whoah, who needs a game when you've got SUCH radial menus!

Absolutely filthy (in a good way).
How are you doing that spin effect EDI? Common, share them secrets =D

hehe, well lets see, it's a bit of a complex effect =)

it all starts with a linear progression with out easing.

that is you have a variable that ranges from 0 to n and as you approach n you take progressively smaller steps.

this gives a nice smooth 'fast to slow' feeling.

this drives all of the effect animations, it should be noted this variable's progression speed is time based =)

as for the layout the menu centers the currently selected node, and places it's children in a ring around it, the ring radius is determined by the circumference neccisary for all the children.

when a menu is shown the radius for the items is set to 0, this value is increased each frame until it gets to maxRadius which is the desired radius, it is increased via the method explained above.

so that gives us the 'fan out' effect.

then a rotation is applied from 0 to 360 to all nodes, with the center node being in the opposite direction, this gives each node that nice spin, again progression is controled by the above.

the resulting effect feels sorta like an expanding saw blade.

=D

Like the spin.

One question, though. What's the point of having radial menus if they just appear in one place on the screen (i.e. the center)? The whole point of the radial menu is to minimize the amount of mouse movement, yet still provide enough visual feedback to the user to make things easy.

For example, here's the radial "V" menu from Cinema 4D.



It pops up under your pointer when you press "V". It's not all that interesting, as it's just a mirror of the C4D menubar, but it's designed to put all of the program's menus within a couple of inches of the pointer.

Here's Carrara Studio's. It's not really radial (more rectangular), but it does change itself depending on the cursor's context



In this case, I'm in the assembly room with no objects, so I get menu items to move about in the room.

Hard-coding the menu to the center of the screen rather defeats the purpose of a radial menu. Of course, this is really intended to be more an issue of eye-candy than ergonomics, but you might consider having an option to show a standard menubar instead, as it'll be easier for first-timers to grasp.

Pontificating blowhard am I.

hehe, well, yes currently it is hardcoded the center, this is for simplicity of implementation, since the moment you allow it to move around, you get into the issues of making sure it can fit where your cursor is.

this might have to change, but for now im not going to over-engineer it if i dont have to =D

i decided to use radial menus based on some conversations with rob loach, waaay back when i started thinking about Project2.

my original thought was to blatently rip off the old SCUMM UI, in relative form and function, but instead i decided to implement a similar system using radial menus. I think even with it as is, it will be a nice, fresh feeling interface.

as for the eye candy, MW didint get much eye candy, it was one of those 'oh we will add the eye candy later' in many cases later never comes, so i am making sure that as i design things they are both beautiful in form and function, since the S3Engine UI is much much simpler than the MW UI it allows me to focus on making a few UI components act really really good, which may mean having it center on your mouse ;)

I was a big fan of the radial menus in the Seiken Densestu set of games (i.e. Secret of Mana), so it's nice to see them being used now. I think the last game that I've played that has used a radial menu was Sacrifice (Also a great game).

I like it!