Image strips are in... And update on dialogs

Today I managed to add the images into the imagestrip. The image strip is the little strip that holds all the icons of the units/buildings you can make, and allows you to scroll through it.

It was rather simple to implement, except I ran into 2 little problems: The original images that were used in the original Dune for the imagestrip end up HUUUUGE when enlarged. So I scaled them up 2 and then reduced them to 66% of their size. That worked quite well(As you will see below).

After that it was a matter of painting the green bar between the 2 images and fit a few images in. Fitting the images in wasn't very difficult, except that was were the other problem was: The icons Stefan provided with his Dune 2 image set were too small. Increasing them in size turned out horrible. Really horrible. Loads of artifacts and they were pretty pixelated.

So I had to find a way to extract the images myself. This was rather problematic, as I had no idea which of the PAK files contained these images, and only 1 PAK file contained the palette files. I downloaded XCC Utilities and started messing around, but I was unable to load a palette after loading a new PAK file.

Eventually I extract the palette file, made copies of the MENTAT.PAK and FINALE.PAK. I then opened up XCC editor and placed the palette file into both these files and saved them. I then loaded up FINALE.PAK and MENTAT.PAK into XCC mixer and discovered that mentat had all the images, but that finale.pak also had a bunch. Duplicates that is, since all these images were also in mentat.pak. I have no idea why there were 15(!!) duplicates in the FINALE.PAK. These images(All just 1 frame) were the sardaukar, death hand, fremen, refinery, MCV, sand worm and a few others. When I looked in mentat.pak, I fould all the images, with their animations.

I extracted these files, and converted them into icons. The icons are 52x32 in size. If anyone wants these, for whatever reason, let me know, and I'll upload them. I also have to extract a few other files from the dune.pak file, since these are missing(I think I'm missing 1 missile impact animation and the burning/burned out tank).

Right now I need to update the image strip so that clicking is supported, it's possible to mask out all the images except 1(The building animation, not sure how I'm going to do that with multiple construction queues) and I need to fix the windows and their title-bar/border drawing.

The UI in action, showing the image strip(Scrolling works) and a window with title bar

I also need find a better way to render client areas of Windows. Right now they are textures. That's a a massive waste of VRAM, so I need to fix that. I'm probably going to use quads for the client area and just cram them into a VertexBuffer and render all the client areas at once. Not sure how that will work out, but I'll experiment with it. Alternatively, I could just create 1x1 textures with the correct background color, and rendered them stretched. Don't know which one is less work and/or cheaper to do in terms of performance.