Finally! We, the Coherent Labs team, are very proud to announce our first product – Coherent UI.

After a mammoth work (that is of course still on-going), I can openly talk about the exciting new technology we are building.

Coherent UI is a user interface middleware aimed at game development companies. It greatly increases the quality and optimizes production costs for UI development.

HUD, in-game browser and a game-in-the-game; all integrated through Coherent UI

The biggest news – you can write the UI for ANY type of game on ANY platform with HTML5. I am a big fan of using the right tools for the job they are designed for and I think HTML5 is exactly the kind of tech game companies have been lacking in their development ecosystem.

Now that I can talk about it, I’ll be able to write much more about the technology we are creating and how we achieved many of our goals. For a quick-start I’ll list some of the tech features we had in mind when we started and that are now available:

• Feature-full HTML5 and CSS3 rendering (3D elements in your UI + canvas + WebGL!)
• GPU acceleration
• Multi-platform
• Full browsing support (you can have a fully featured browser embedded in your game)
  •   SSL
  •   plugins
  •   cookies
  •   local storage
  •   proxies
  •   etc.
• Fast JavaScipt (yes, it’s usually V8)
• Super fast and powerful binding (native <-> JavaScript = FAST)
• Debugging and profiling (you can debug JS code with breakpoints, watches etc.; performance profiling on JS and rendering)
• Built-in support for click-through queries (I’ve seen unbelievable hacks in the past dealing with this and couldn’t stand it anymore)
• Proper composition of ClearType text on transparent background (it’s amazing how few people get this one right)
• Easy to use and clean API (it’s more difficult than it sounds)

A sample game menu made with Coherent UI

These are just a high-level overview of what we now have and continue to improve.

Stay tuned for I plan to post many of my thoughts about how we achieved all this, what mistakes we made (and probably are still making) and what went really right. Hope you’ll enjoy.

Follow Stoyan on Twitter: @stoyannk