HUD Fever

A couple of days ago, someone posted a comment on one of my entries, saying that she'd seen the emotion buttons running down the side of some of my screen shots, and asking what HUD lets me do it.

As a matter of fact, it's a HUD I wrote a few months ago (and which, quite coincidentally, I had put up for sale in my store only a couple of hours before she posted her comment). I love HUDs, and if you design them properly, they can actually be really simple. The example HUD I made for LSL205 (a jump assistance HUD, shown at the right, which lets you select from five different jump strengths) consisted of six prims, one texture, a main script of 19 lines (not including comments and blank lines), and a 28-line script that goes into each of the five buttons.

I've made quite a few HUDs, come to think of it. There's the class schedule HUD I blogged about a little while ago (which is actually pretty complex, admittedly); the aforementioned emotion HUD; a HUD I made for landscaping (I loathe the built-in "Edit Land" tool, I always end up making things look worse than when they started); a favorite-places teleporter HUD; a "PowerPoint" controller HUD...

Students seemed to have so much fun with the jump assist HUD that I'm planning to teach a workshop just on designing and making HUDs - the one in LSL205 was really only a demonstration of link messages, and I didn't really get into the planning, texturing or physical construction of the HUD.

Now I just need to decide what the example HUD for the workshop should do. Time to hit the LSL Wiki and look at function names until an idea germinates, I guess.