Thanks for the heads up, PeeWee!
Just so the folks know it is not your opinion that Dr. Dungeon made a terrible oversight or a big mistake. It was my own words sent to PW. What happened there is that when I got my iMac in 2007, I decided to port the klunky and unfinished Windows UZ4 to the Mac and make improvements.
The first "improvement" was when I noticed I have all this screen real estate to work with, 1920x1200 wheee! So I went nuts and drew dozens of elaborate panels to fill up the screen. THEN I realized that a whole slew of potential players don't have 1920x1200 iMacs! Many will use notebooks with lower resolutions. There was no way to re-do the whole thing so it just sat there in limbo. (Its still there!)
There were other problems with the old UZ4. The screen view was too large compared to the tiny inventories, which gave it an unbalanced look. Something about the whole thing looked like a webpage rather than a game. The interface was terrible, relying on icons rather than a snappier, intuitive cursor.
The idea of MadMan was to start from scratch, and fix all these issues from the ground up, using only the graphics set and some of the functions from UZ4.
The resolution issue was mostly solved by going lower, so I checked stats on many different desktops as well as notebooks and it seems almost all of them supported 1280x800, which had become sort of the "new" 1024x768. Then of course widescreens were becoming the big thing, like everywhere. At first 16:10 then later, apparently because of movies and DVD's, 16:9.
They say our eyes move mostly left to right rather than top to down as the reason for the proliferation of widescreens.
So the last issue was to make a few extra panels in the game and some minor changes so that it will look good in either ratio, filling the whole screen nicely. It can still run on a 4:3 square screen, in a letter box, but I've learned that this ratio is used by only a small percentage of computer owners.
Yes, I'm working on the character create panel right now. It is similar in some ways to the game "Escahalon". I made things fairly wide and open, giving it a very clean, crisp sort of look. I'll see about getting a screen shot up.
The tricky part - not hard, just tedious, is making the program track the mouse properly over all the buttons, etc., plus a built-in information scheme that describes every stat, etc., on the screen as you roll the mouse. Not a hard thing, just a pain.
As far as UZ4 goes, it would be ported into the "MAD" engine. But if that happens depends a lot on how MadMan does. Dr. D.
You're a very literal-minded person, friend.
