System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

The Window System

Every panel in the game — all 24 of them — is a real, draggable, resizable window, the way any desktop app would work

Every UI panel in Blister Online — the inventory, the crafting menu, the map, the skill tree, the bestiary, the quest log, and everything else — behaves as a genuine desktop-style window: it can be dragged by its title bar, resized from its edges, and minimised out of the way, rather than sitting fixed in the centre of the screen. If you've only ever seen these panels pop up and vanish, it's worth knowing they can be moved and reshaped to fit however you like to play. This is a separate system from HUD Customization, which covers the pieces drawn directly onto the screen during play — the clock, the compass, the minimap and 25 others — none of which are windows at all.

Dragging, resizing, and minimising

Every window carries a sticky title bar — it stays pinned to the top of the panel as you scroll the content underneath it, so "drag to move" always has somewhere to grab regardless of how far you've scrolled inside. Minimising a window doesn't close it; it tucks it away into a shared tray along the bottom of the screen, the same shape as a Windows taskbar. The tray shows every window that's either open or minimised in one row — an open window's button is drawn pressed in, a minimised one's drawn out — and clicking any button in the tray toggles that window open or shut again.

Positions are remembered

Where you leave a window — its position and size — is saved in your browser and restored the next time that same window opens, so a layout you've arranged once doesn't need rebuilding every session.

A retro frame, with an accent you can switch off

Windows carry a purpose-drawn frame — a titlebar, a beveled rim, and an inactive look for a window that isn't the one you're currently interacting with — rather than a plain box. None of the underlying behaviour changed to get there: dragging, resizing, the close button, and the tray were all already working before this skin existed, and the frame simply sits around them. A cyan raking glint is the default look; a WINDOW ACCENT switch on the Pause menu swaps it for plain black and white for anyone who'd rather not have it. A File/View/Help menu strip and status bar the original design also showed were deliberately left unbuilt — there's nothing behind those menus to open.

Fixed Layout UI: the other way to play

Everything above describes the default, "classic" layout, where every panel is a free-floating window you drag around the screen yourself. A separate FIXED LAYOUT UI switch on the Pause menu replaces that with a docked arrangement instead — most panels snap to fixed positions along the screen's edges rather than opening as movable windows, and the inventory in particular becomes a permanent sidebar down the left edge that [TAB] collapses and restores, rather than a window you open and close. The two modes are otherwise built on the same underlying panels; switching between them doesn't lose anything you were doing, though a panel open in one mode when you switch will close and needs reopening in the other.

Docked panels follow their own "one thing at a time" rule, separate from — but built to feel consistent with — the floating windows' own tray and stacking behaviour: opening one docked panel closes any other that was open, in every direction (a side panel closes a full window and vice versa), and [ESCAPE] closes whichever docked panel is open before it ever reaches the pause menu. Getting every one of the fixed layout's readouts (the hotbar, HP bar, compass, XP bar, skills list and more) to correctly resize and reposition itself around the docked panels — rather than around the whole browser window, which is what let a docked chat panel or side panel silently paint over several of them at once — took a long, dedicated run of fixes across many versions, as did chasing the inventory sidebar's own knock-on effects once it stopped being a simple window.

The docked message log in particular has a rougher history than everything else on this page: it's the game's only surface for on-screen messages (an older floating-toast system was quietly retired), and it has gone silently dark on a fresh boot — visibly present, completely empty, with real startup messages already missed and every later one joining them unseen — three separate times across this project's history. It's since been rebuilt so that can't recur, and picked up real reading comfort along the way: scrolling up to reread something no longer snaps back to the bottom the instant a new message arrives, holding your place and showing a small unread count instead until you choose to jump back down.

Version history

Windows introduced, but only for seven of the game's 24 panels. Directly on request: "all the windows should look like a window opened in Windows XP, with a bar at the top." The first version only knew how to dress one specific family of panel, and stretched their contents to fill the frame on resize — which broke panels drawn at a fixed size, blowing one crafting panel out to over 1,600 pixels tall inside a 720-pixel view.
Extended to all 24 panels, and the stretching bug fixed. A full count of every panel in the game found only seven had ever actually been dressed as a window — the other seventeen, including several that could cover the entire screen, had simply been missed. Rebuilt to dress the panel's own outer element directly rather than reaching inside and forcing its children to fill the frame, and found by periodically checking which panels are actually on screen rather than trying to hook each panel's own, differently-shaped way of opening — which is exactly how the first attempt missed two-thirds of them.
Every window given its own permanent taskbar button, so a currently-open window can be closed straight from the tray, not only reopened once it's already minimised.
The retro frame restyle added, from a supplied art design honoured almost exactly as delivered: the cyan accent as the default, a switch to black and white, and no menu strip or status bar since neither has anything behind it. The close button's hit area was kept at the project's own 24px floor even though the artwork itself drew it smaller, by painting the smaller glyph inside the full-size button rather than shrinking the clickable area to match the art.
Fixed Layout UI added, described above — a docked alternative to the floating windows this whole page otherwise covers. Getting every readout to correctly resize and reposition around the docked panels, rather than the whole browser window, took a long dedicated run of fixes: readouts painting directly on top of each other, the 3D view being draggable down to a sliver with nothing scaling to match, [ESCAPE] opening the pause menu on top of an open docked panel instead of closing it, and several rounds of content clipping in individual panels at their own minimum widths.
v1121-v1128 — a full interface redesign, built piece by piece against a real reference file and switched on all at once. After roughly fifty versions rebuilding individual elements (the hotbar, the target bar, the quest tracker card, the status stack, a character portrait card) to match a supplied design once its reference file finally reached the project, v1128 switches the old arrangement off entirely and draws the new one: a rebuilt main menu (character select and settings had never been redesigned before this), a top-left console for biome/coordinates/cash, and one full console along the bottom holding the character card, hotbar and a button rail together. Every number the new screens show is read from the same game state the old HUD always used — nothing about how the game tracks your stats changed, only how it's drawn, and the change also caught and fixed nine keyboard shortcuts that had quietly stopped working, now rebound through a permanent watchdog rather than a one-time pass at load.
v1111, v1114, v1116 — the "one thing at a time" rule and layer order both had real gaps. Three panels (guidebook, achievement log, spellbook) were only half-wired into the docked exclusivity rule described above, letting two of them render in the exact same spot at once; fixed for the docked layout specifically, leaving the classic floating windows untouched. Separately, three other panels (skill tree, achievement log, ink panel) had been accidentally placed in the same top-priority layer reserved for the save-conflict and mouse-look-refused notices, so opening the achievement log full-screen could bury the one message explaining why mouse-look wasn't working — moved back down to the ordinary UI layer. A tutorial offer card that stays hidden while any panel is open was also found to only check that once, at creation, letting it sit visibly behind panels opened afterward; it now rechecks on every panel-open event.
v1156 — a real keyboard remapping panel for the nine keys freed up by v1128 (K, C, M, O, U, N, I, CapsLock, and the left bracket): pick a key, then step through every menu on the console's button rail to bind it. Choices are remembered permanently, shared across every character on the machine rather than tied to one save, since a keyboard layout belongs to the person at it rather than to a character.
v1404-v1408 — six docked menu tabs were found completely dead, along with a second toolbar's buttons. CRAFT, MAP, PETS, LEGEND, APEX and HOME had each been opening their panel by pressing one of the nine keys v1156's remapping freed up, so once a key was reassigned the tab it depended on quietly stopped working — some for a very long stretch, since nothing in the game's own testing could reach a panel behind a freed key either. A separate toolbar had the same fault one level worse, faking an actual keypress rather than naming a handler. Every one of these controls now opens its panel directly, trying the keyboard shortcut first only where one still genuinely exists, and permanent checks were added afterward that press each tab and confirm something real opens, so a tab going dead this way again wouldn't go unnoticed.

Trivia

The taskbar button assigned to each window uses the exact same glyph its own launcher already wears elsewhere in the UI, so a minimised window stays recognisable by the same symbol you originally clicked to open it.
The full rebuild was found by periodically scanning which of the 24 known panel ids are actually visible on screen, rather than trying to hook each panel's own opening event individually — the approach the very first, incomplete version had used, and the reason it missed as many as it did.