Harh, harh!AusSkiller wrote:.. it only takes me a week or two to knock out a purpose built functional UI anyway it's usually not worth using existing libraries.
I guess we should see a video capture of the working demo in less than a week now?jacmoe wrote:I am intrigued: what exactly is it you need from existing Ogre based GUIs that they don't give you?
Nah it's not critical for the UI at all, in my previous UI system 99 times out of 100 it had finished rendering before anything else would have been added to the buffer anyway so a blocking call wouldn't have had much impact on performance anyway.bstone wrote:Since Ogre is a general purpose 3D rendering engine you won't be able to issue one render call while you prepare another one. But if that's critical to your UI then you should consider a 2D engine with a bit of 3D stuff added instead
Looks a bit basic for all my UI needs, but it might offer a solution for text rendering (though I'll have to look into it further to be sure), because as I mentioned I'm not keen on using bitmap fonts again and haven't looked into font renders much yet.bstone wrote:If you're fine with Ogre having control over that then have a look at Gorilla. It's a lightweight library for 2D rendering in Ogre. You should be able to do whatever UI you want with that without limiting yourself too much.
No that's really all it takes me to program a *purpose built* *functional* UI, obviously it wouldn't have anywhere near the same level of functionality that a third party library would, but it would be capable of pretty much everything I'd need. And it only takes a week or two to get it functional, but that wouldn't be complete, it takes more time for me to polish it up, fix bugs and add a few additional features here and there but that's just work I can do as needed throughout the rest of the project and it takes a lot less time to do when I write all the code myself compared to when I need to change or add something to a third party library.jacmoe wrote:Harh, harh!AusSkiller wrote:.. it only takes me a week or two to knock out a purpose built functional UI anyway it's usually not worth using existing libraries.
The main thing that I keep running into is the mixing of different coordinate types, sometimes I will want to specify the width of an element as a percentage of parent size, but other times as percentage of screen size, fixed pixel size, reference scaled size independent of aspect ratio, reference scaled size dependent on aspect ratio or even DPI based size. Most UIs don't support different all those coordinate types so I always end up needing to write code to do the conversions for many of the elements to get the desired results which kind of ruins the point of having a data driven UI (which is another thing I want). Android's UI system does a fairly decent job of this sort of thing but there were a few times when I needed coordinate types it didn't support.jacmoe wrote:I am intrigued: what exactly is it you need from existing Ogre based GUIs that they don't give you?
I haven't tried any Ogre UIs yet because I want more information so I can make a better decision on how to proceed, but many of the UIs I briefly looked at didn't seem to have what I wanted anyway. CEGUI looked OK but I didn't see any indication that it supported all the coordinates types I like to usejacmoe wrote:Could you give a list of those you have tried?
.Haha, yeah I know, I'm often guilty of re-writing stuff unnecessarily, my colleagues often refer to the time I re-wrote printf because I felt Microsoft's implementation might be slow and it wasn't entirely thread safe, I spent ages working on it even though I knew printf would have been perfectly acceptable, but at least in the end I had an equivalent function that was completely thread safe and many times faster in pretty much all cases. I'm just more comfortable and much more productive when I'm using my own code, I figured I'd make an exception for the rendering engine because Ogre had a lot of features I really couldn't be bothered writing myself in such a robust manner, but UIs are much easier and quicker to code when they are purpose built so I'd rather not use a library unless it already has pretty much everything I intend to use built in.bstone wrote:And yeah... this one is not getting any older yet:
Yeah but the problem remains, what is the best way render it in Ogre? I mean I suppose I could probably just use manual objects, I could certainly get the job done quickly that way and with an orthographic projection and using depth on the scene node position I suppose that would ensure correct render order but surely there's a better way to do it.bstone wrote:Alright, alright. You have your week now for the multiple coordinate types, anchors, and the full compliment of elements. No need to thank me
. I got to admit I do like minimal + open source, I'll investigate it further, as long as it's hardware accelerated I'm sure I'll be able to bend it to my needs, but not sure if it'll be worth all the extra time spent trying to figure it out, but I guess since I'm not really on the clock time isn't such a big deal and I do know how much better it is to use a well tested library than it is to just write it myself and hope I didn't miss any bugs.jacmoe wrote:Go with Gorilla, it has been used as a base for at least one GUI using Ogre.
Betajaen made Gorilla which is the successor of Betagui, one of the first truly minimal GUIs for Ogre.
It simply can't get any more minimal than that.
That's exactly where I started looking before creating this thread, but none really jumped out as being a great solution for my needs though, CEGUI looked good but also a little too developed to easily modify if I needed to, but I did only briefly look at each. I'll have a proper look into Gorilla to see how that works and if it'll do for what I want.jacmoe wrote:Start here:
http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-ind ... on+of+GUIs
. I also noticed that Gorilla seems to use bitmap fonts which is disappointing, I might have to find a different library to handle font rendering . 
I tend to find GUI code is usually rather easy to write, the only part that gives me any difficulty is text, though bitmap fonts usually make that a non-issue. Of course this time I'm thinking I may try not using bitmap fonts so that could be a lot more tricky than I'm estimating, but at least the rest I should be able breeze through pretty quickly. Of course since I'd be making a purpose built UI for this one game rather than a general purpose library I can take a heap of shortcuts skipping a lot of common features of UIs that I know I'm not going to need in this game.betajaen wrote:It really is difficult to write a GUI.
Fine; buttons, sliders and text boxes (to an extent) are easy (providing you have a good 2D drawing layer) - but when it comes to more complicated UI then it gets excessive, it can be just as big as your program.
I know, but third party libraries can limit what you can do and you may be using it too extensively to do anything about it when you actually realize the limitation, but if you write stuff yourself you can pretty much guarantee you can do everything you want. I'm willing to use libraries for things that would take considerable effort to write myself, like the graphics engine, audio, and the physics engine (though I'm not sure I'll need a physics engine in this game), but for something like UI that I'll have little trouble writing myself I'd rather not deal with the potential limitations of a library.betajaen wrote:I mean, you picked to use Ogre than using DirectX and OpenGL? Why not do the same for a GUI library?
Yeah I read about that ages ago, quite an interesting solution to that sort of thing, but the real problem with bitmap fonts is language support, if I wanted to support Asian languages there are FAR too many characters for bitmap fonts to be viable (I think there are over 100,000 characters in Chinese alone, though I suspect they have a simplified set for use on computers). It's not a deal breaker though, if it looks like a it'll be a lot of effort to support large character sets then I'll just use bitmap fonts which should be fine for most European languages at least.betajaen wrote:p.s. Bitmap fonts aren't too bad, if you want a scalable font - then Valve solved this with Signed Distance Fields.
I think you may have the wrong idea about what I intend to do, I'm only going to be making a rather basic UI, nothing ground breaking, it'll just have a few features that make it easier/quicker for me to set up the UI layouts, and a few minor back end conveniences like basic nine patch support, other than that it'll be a very run of the mill, unspectacular UI, that's why I know I can get it done relatively quickly.jacmoe wrote:Can't wait to see that earthshatteringly awesome GUI you are going to cook up.
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