Your First HUD Video Tutorial for Beginners

[lillypadgurl]

Here is a simple example tutorial I did on how to make your first HUD.

 

This is for beginners only :)

Button 1 Download:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ox1dvy80a6uxpga/Button1.png

Source Reference:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6nsa39aw2vnaab5/SimpleHUD.txt

Pure Alpha file:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/iqlj402gic8fpka/PureAlpha.png

Hope you find this useful :)

[Rolig Loon]

That's a nice tutorial, well thought out.  If you ever redo it, you may want to consider a few things that could make life simpler for your newbie viewers:

Your avatar's local "forward" direction is always East, so anything attached to your screen should be aligned with that in mind.  You can always rotate a HUD after you make it, as you did in the tutorial, but it's better practice to build it with all textures on its local West face (face #4 if it's a cube).

Anything on your screen is 2-D, so it doesn't matter how thick it is in the local X direction or how the sides and back are textured.  It also doesn't make any difference whether any linked prims are very close to it, as long as they are stacked closer to your viewpoint.    You can be quite sloppy about spacing in the X direction. :smileywink:

Generally speaking, it's a good idea to avoid low channel numbers, even negative ones.  Newbie scripters tend to use those a lot, so the chances for crosstalk are relatively high, especially if they have been doing a lot of practice scripting and routinely using channels like -101, -102, -103....  Your listen event will filter out messages that don't come from the HUD, but it's cleaner to use a channel that almost certainly won't have other objects using it, like -28994712.

[Yingzi Xue]

Good job on the tutorial.

HUD's are an excellent way to make intuitive user interfaces and save on memory in your main script.  Some of the other methods of input, like dialog menu or chat commands can use a lot of a script's memory.

I love the ASCII art you added to your script picture.  Nice touch.  I used to do ANSI and ASCII art back in the day, did you do it yourself?  You've inspired me to make one for my own scripts. *grin*  Side note, you left the Hello Avatar line in state_entry() on the linked snapshot.