Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DonHopkins 680 days ago
Pie menus work quite well for selecting tools, as an alternative to the tool palette. Here are pie menus in SimCity for X11 (from around 1992):

X11 SimCity Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA

Here's a demo of a more recent version for Flash from around 2009, which demonstrates how the pie menus serve as a much quicker alternative to the tool palette:

Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE

And of course The Sims 1 uses pie menus too.

The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs

2 comments

Hahaha, amazing how nobody noticed who posted this.

https://donhopkins.com/home/catalog/piemenus/piemenus-hopkin...

I think you forgot to include the Flash link.
It doesn't work any more since Flash is no longer supported. But here's the OpenLaszlo source code for the Flash pie menus:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/laszlo/m...

Here's a link to the WebAssembly / WebGL / HTML / SvelteKit development version of Micropolis (SimCity), but I haven't implemented most of the user interface or pie menus yet.

https://micropolisweb.com/

https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore

SvelteKit pie menus for Micropolis are my roadmap, and I've started implementing pie menus for SvelteKit by translating my old jQuery pie menus code, but jQuery and SvelteKit has vastly different architectures, so there's more work to do, and I'm working on it in my spare time, not as a full time job.

Old jQuery pie menus:

https://github.com/SimHacker/jquery-pie/blob/master/javascri...

New SvelteKit pie menus for Micropolis (SimCity), a work in progress, but I haven't written the rendering stuff yet:

https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/microp...

Also, here's a video of the Unity3D pie menus I implemented a dozen years or so ago (there's a link to the code in the description, but it's 12 years old and Unity's approach to user interfaces has changed a lot since then):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMN1LQ7qx9g