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| Brandon | Quick TipsWith GUI Awards comming up, I thought a list of tips would be helpful. I'll list a few and if any are added in comments I'll post them aswell. [li][b]Size Matters [/b]Idealy a GUI should be between 1-3MB and maybe 5MB at most. As a long time Dial-up user, I can tell you that downloading Blue(~8MB) wasn't a lot of fun.[/li][li][b]Balance Eye Candy [/b]Sure in DOS Box with a high cycle count, the eye candy is nice, but on a 386 or 486 that eye candy can lead to a slow unresponsive GUI[/li][li][b]Images [/b]I'm not going to name names but a GUI was a big download, something like 10MB, but the GUI itself was only a few MB, the wasted space? Huge 24Bit BMP images for wallpaper. Use a compressed format (GIF/JPEG/PNG) or use smaller images, remember the first tip[/li][li][b]Dynamic Location [/b]Some GUIs require that they are installed in a certain folder in the C drive, don't hard code the directories, for 2 reasons: 1. People might want 2 copies or a portable copy and 2. It shows a laziness in the coding.[/li][li][b]Speed is Everything [/b]DOSBox is a good testing tool, but it can be manipulated into making you think a slow GUI is fast. 5000 Cycles should be good for testing, it's probably about the speed of a low end 386 and if its fast there, it will fly on a 486.[/li] | 2009-11-17 | 11:14 AM |
| jasonwoodland | Re:Quick TipsI plead guilty to Images, you'll see a difference in Geode for sure. not in speed though. :unsure: " | 2009-11-18 | 12:01 AM |
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