In-Game Console - General Programming - GameDev.net

Posted Yesterday, 01:45 PM

Most, and hereby I mean practically any game I have every played in release, use the in-game GUI to display the console, not an external window API like Windows' own.<br />Thereby they can toggle all aspects of its appearance - but there is much more to it than just pretty graphics, although ones like Source Engine's is both very pretty and functional (listing all cvars related to the chars you have typed so far and easy help/description for any cvars, for instance) IMHO, though I miss an "in-game appearance" (you cannot type while playing - console must be accessed from the menu).<br />You also need a way to bind console input (like "help", "max_fps 100", "quit", etc.) to actual source in order to command the game to do something.<br />Quake, as you mentioned, uses a system of cvars (console variables and commands) - you can read all about both online and in their released source (the newest edition of id's cvar system in actual source, that I know of, lies accessible in their Half Life 2 SDK).<br />Games like FarCry exposes this functionality via a full fledged scripting system (Lua, in this case) and binds commands/variables and the necessary callbacks this way, since they use it for all other scripting purposes anyways.<br />

Source: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/637199-in-game-console/

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