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[Quicksand-S]

Yeah...I didn't even consider that it might be a gun. It was a nice idea, but without the shape actually being gun-like at all, I feel like it'd only work in a higher-resolution logo (which, to be clear, I'm not actually recommending).

You're right that without the tint the text is a lot easier to read. I still think it looks a bit weird, though, because a lot of these colors don't really go together. The menu kind of clashes with both the logo and the background. Any idea what you'll do to show which menu item is currently selected or hovered over?

This is something like what I'm thinking:


The dark blue is slightly turquoise to fit with the logo, and the text uses colors that are a little more common in the background. I'm not saying this looks perfect (I'm not a fan of the yellow I used there), but I think the elements clash a lot less this way. If you wanted to go purely complimentary, the selected text could be orange instead of yellowish. Actually, with the base text orange and the selected text a slightly better yellow, it looks pretty good. (Useful site: http://paletton.com/#uid=33L0u0kxO++kj+lqo+WV8+SZrBN)

One other thing I noticed is that the text isn't vertically centered in the box. There are three more pixels of space at the bottom than the top. I'd also recommend just adjusting the placement of all elements, so there's more space around the logo and not so much empty space at the bottom of the screen.

[harkme]

Ooh, that looks nice! I'll have to revisit my menu colour scheme and layout adjustments once I finish my current engine tweaks. Thank you so much for your suggestions! I currently use white to show a menu item is selected like so:



Your colour scheme is definitely easier on the eyes. I do need to centre some elements, but I wasn't sure if I should move the window down, since the other menus are longer, but I wanted them to start at the same level. For example, the video settings screen takes up more vertical space:



and now I'm noticing some more centring issues...

[Quicksand-S]

Well, my first thought is that you should keep the vertical center of the box consistent, so that no matter what the size is, it still feels centered. Of course, whether or not that works depends on how many menu items you have in your biggest menu.

You could maybe consider having multiple columns if the list gets too long. That could work well for settings, at least. Another option is to just use smaller text for settings like some games do. After all, they're more like sub-items than main menu items.

I just went back and checked out the old version again because I was curious. Why is the default resolution a 4:3 one? It also seems like a fairly big issue that switching to a 16:9 resolution stretches everything. (On a side note, it's amazing how much better the menu looks now. I'd forgotten how messy it was before.)

I also noticed I had slightly laggy mouse movement caused by a sub-30fps frame-rate. I guess that's the issue with raycasting. Turning the raycast quality down a bit got me up to 60 without too much of a hit to the visuals. Strangely, I get a steady 50fps in the menu. Seems like a weird number. Is there a reason for that in the code, or is it just my graphics card being strange?

[harkme]

My mindset is still stuck in the 90s, so I by default start out with a 4:3 resolution for the game window when I start development. I did adjust the in-game rendering for widescreen, but UI graphics are stretched. It's always these sort of things that are necessary to adjust but hard to get motivated to do. I'll get around to it eventually...

The raycasting algorithm I use is pretty inefficient and somewhat embarrassing naive, but that's down to my terrible programming skills. I locked the menu at around 50FPS just arbitrarily. By the way, what is your graphics card? I'm trying to get a feel for performance, but the minimum graphics card I had available to run it on was an 8800GT.

[Quicksand-S]

Yeah, even if you're stuck in the 90s, it's still probably a good idea to work with present-day resolution ratios. Anyway, there's probably no need to redraw the HUD elements. Just scale them if necessary, and adjust their positions based on the screen ratio.

By the way, what is your graphics card? I'm trying to get a feel for performance, but the minimum graphics card I had available to run it on was an 8800GT.

I've got a GTX 285 (1GB VRAM), which is around two years newer than an 8800GT. My processor is an older quad-core i7.

[harkme]

I know I just need to scale and adjust positions, but I just find it a little tedious, that's all. Maybe it won't feel so tedious once I actually start working on it, that's what sometimes happens. Thanks for your specs, I'll have to see if I can improve rendering performance.

Opening post has been updated with an added Best Time display for each level (will show "Not Completed" if you completed the level on a previous version). I have also reorganized the code to reduce excessive multithreading, which didn't seem to help performance anyway. A couple huge memory leaks were fixed (including one that leaked ~5MBs each level load) as well as some sources of crashes, hopefully I got them all.