SITREP #11: figuring out a better UI, using javascript in vam (Patreon)

PREVIOUS APPROACHES AT UI

I've been looking for ways to do a decent custom user interface in VAM for quite a while now, even since before starting to share plugins and before this patreon page. Trying to do it through VAM atoms is doable (e.g. Colorful) but messy and difficult to maintain and close to impossible to expand a lot. 

Doing it directly through Unity is the most gamedev-y way of doing it and I took a few jabs at that too. However Unity UI was mostly meant to be designed and setup through the unity editor, not through code. And even that way it's not a very user-friendly. It's doable through code too but it's just a ton of work and headaches to do very,very small stuff if you're not a Unity expert. A lot of time wasted for small results.

The most advanced vam UI I did by far was also the quickest and it was the ui of the chatbots demo. There I took a very different approach and used the local server that was holding the chatbot to also host some simple php and have that ui as sort of like a local website. That approach however was not really vam-friendly: it requires installing and running extra-software, there's security concerns with that, too many steps. It would likely be uncompatible with vam plugins guidelines. But I absolutely loved how easy it was to do a lot of complicated stuff in a very short amount of time by using a browser atom as a UI holder and have in it the UI built in html/css and with javascript.

NEW APPROACH

I reflected on the previous attempts and looked into it a bit more and I think I found the perfect way of doing UIs now by using local html/css/javascript for the interface, rendering it through a vam browser and connecting to the javascript code of the interface through unity's C# (back and forth communication between the two). This way there won't be any need for other software like a web server, the processing is done directly in VAM. And it will allow creating UIs with css and javascript which is a million times easier than through C#, at least for me anyway. I need to test this a bit more but so far it all looks good and this shouId allow for some pretty crazy stuff to be done very quickly .

MAIN AETERNUM UI

I tried a few things and I think the best direction to go in is towards something like in the video. The UI will be sort of like a tablet. The main goal is to have everything in one place and keep it clean and intuitive. It's going to mimic android functionality, messages/events as notifications, contacts as a characters list, pages as apps. In VR it's going to be the size of a tablet and it will show/hide in your when pressing a certain combination of buttons. To me this seems the best way to move forward. If you guys have any other ideas or suggestions please let me know!