ReCode /

It's official, we've licensed the Otter UI library to use in Skullgirls.

Why Otter and not Scaleform? Perhaps the most important design decision for any middleware is where it draws the line in the sand: how much it does, and how much it relies on the game to provide. You don't want it to leave a critical and difficult problem for the game to deal with, but you also don't want it doing trivial things, which often makes the middleware unnecessarily rigid and inflexible.

In a nutshell:

• Otter does not use Flash, so it comes with its own animation editor.
• Otter doesn't have a script of its own, which means that the UI logic can be implemented in C++ or in Lua. This removes the need for a separate Flash interpreter in your game.
• Otter's runtime (the "player", in Flash terms) does not do any rendering. Instead, it just tells your game what textures to load and what polygons to draw -- which makes it very portable. Besides, it integrates seamlessly in your engine's shading framework.

Lastly but perhaps most importantly, the Aonyx team has been a pleasure to work with.

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