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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

> The first limitation is the quality of the graphics and the user interface, which, as you can see from the screenshots above, are pretty bare-bones. The UI is straight out of the Windows 3.1 era, all vanilla Windows radio buttons and lists and drop-downs.

That is sincerely one of my favorite things about games from that era.

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The screenshots immediately reminded me of the original computer version of Harpoon when it was updated for Windows 95. I still find that game's interface to be one of the easiest ways to manage a complex amount of information.

Incidentally, these screenshots aren't too far off what actual console UIs look like for complex military systems. I think CDE is more common than Win32, though.

I had the same exact thought!

Bunch of screenshots here in case anyone is interested: http://armchairgeneral.com/harpoon-ultimate-edition-pc-game-...

You're correct that CDE used to be the standard for GCCS, run on HP-UX.

I think it's mostly Windows based for that particular thing now (the actual real time consoles use a Unix but with a custom UI - not CDE -- as I recall), but it's been a few years since I was in that world.

Same. I love the fact that games like Minesweeper or Chip's Challenge are literally just grids of button-controls with image labels.

I'd love to see "using non-behaviorally-overridden native OS UI-toolkit elements as the game's only mechanical affordances" adopted as a theme for a modern game-jam.

Serious question. If I want to build a game that looks like this today, what are my options? Anybody know?

a) gtk or qt with a suitable theme b) imgui or some similar immediate-mode UI. suitably themed.

Use the Win32 API directly. It's still there, never went anywhere. You can even use winelib on Linux.

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