I heartily recommend trying out some CityBuilder servers. You claim a small town and provide it different types of cargo as it grows. It really tests your TTD skills, as you need to provide constant streams of cargo every month to keep the town growing.
There are probably several CityBuilder servers, but I mostly played on the BTPro[1] ones. Everyone starts at the same time and the goal is usually timeboxed to 3 hours, after which the server resets with a new map.
I haven't played the game for a few years, but these goal servers kept me hooked for months.
I've also picked up AOE2:HD again and agree with all the frustrating parts you mentioned. Age of Mythology (and AoE III) seems to have much better unit AI, saner move command chaining (shift+click), nicer chaining of research and training, less micro management of villagers (e.g. farms are infinite), visible UI for idle villagers and control groups, yet most of my friends have only played AoE2 in their teens, so that's what we go with the rare times we get together to play.
Many game developers seem to build their own UI libraries from scratch. Wouldn't it make sense to use Chromium Embedded Framework[0] or Awesomium[1] instead? I haven't used them myself (yet), but writing a UI in HTML+CSS sounds a lot easier than learning a new API.
Writing UIs in HTML+CSS is only easy for people who know it already, to be honest. It's not a great UI layer.
I've been using it for almost 20 years now, and I'm still easily confused by the completely unintuitive interactions of CSS parameters like floats and clears, position:relative, box model nuances, etc. (I'm sure that someone is now itching to chime in and tell me I'm not a "real web developer", sort of like the argument on HN the other day about whether "real developers" are allowed to write <br/> ...)
Game development teams don't tend to include CSS wizards. Writing a new API can be a reasonable choice given the expertise available... Not to mention the substantial runtime overhead of loading a complete browser just to display some UI widgets.
You are somewhat right in that HTML and CSS heavily inspired what kiUi became.
But there are two major concerns that are not adressed by your solution :
- Embedding a whole browser in your app just to display a few widgets is not my definition of "lightweight"
- Often coding UI in native code (C++) makes a lot more sense, integrate with exiting code in a much cleaner way
Game developpers would much less tend to build their own libraries from scratch, if there was at least one that satisfied all of these 'basic' requirements : lightweight, skinnable, auto-layout
I agree, embedding a browser doesn't seem lightweight at all. What it does give, however, is a common and comprehensive framework for laying out and styling your UI elements. Every web developer can now be a game UI designer.
Some of the benefits I see with HTML+CSS(+JS) based UI:
* Comprehensive feature set
* Easy prototyping
* Easy modding
* No recompilation required
* Web full of documentation & examples
* Common skill for developers/designers
The main disadvantage is probably the performance hit of having a full-blown browser engine in your game, but it seems to work OK for AAA games. I believe Anno 2070 uses Awesomium for some of its content: http://www.posidyn.com/games/anno2070/anno2070-09.jpg
Ruby >= 1.9 also has a built in libffi wrapper, "Fiddle"[1], which can replicate basic Ruby-FFI functionality with some glue code[2]. There aren't many examples, but I've successfully used it to call Windows API (GDI+) functions.
Between the two 'extremes' of standing and sitting, there's also the saddle chair [1]. I've used one at home for over a year now, but only up to a few hours a day, so can't really tell how much it has affected my posture in addition to regular exercise.
I wanted to try something like this but didn't have one so I used a stool (4 legged IKEA with thin cushion). Not good, exhaustion feeling comes quickly, bad blood flow I suppose. I never bother searching for a real saddle chair but your post makes me wanna buy one.
There are probably several CityBuilder servers, but I mostly played on the BTPro[1] ones. Everyone starts at the same time and the goal is usually timeboxed to 3 hours, after which the server resets with a new map.
I haven't played the game for a few years, but these goal servers kept me hooked for months.
[1] https://openttd.btpro.nl/