The New GUI

jouninkomiko · Post by **jouninkomiko** » 21 Dec 2005, 00:16

Ok guys, I'm making a sticky post for details on the new GUI system in development. I have decided to use http://www.cegui.org.uk, which is a fairly complicated, not very well documented (yet) GUI system that can render in OGRE, OpenGL, or D3D, which is very cool. Once coded up, the GUI can be defined in external xml files. Also, a new feature added to the library recently allows for skinning, which is the point of this post. We need people to go to this site, learn how the skinning system works (in particular, falagard, the name of the system) and make a skin for the GUI. I personally think it would be cool for someone to take the art from OTA and make a skin out of that, and also make a new age one. CEGUI as a whole is, as I said, complicated, so I'm spending a bunch of time writing my own test applications and reading others code so I can understand how it works. I'll be posting those apps here for those curious and those who would like to help somehow.

Masse · Post by **Masse** » 21 Dec 2005, 01:01

thats damn good news

if i get REALLY bored i might take a look at the skinning

but i might have too much stuff todo allready

BvDorp · Post by **BvDorp** » 21 Dec 2005, 02:45

Wow this looks awesome! Will this system support for all features asked? For now I see:

- Chatting
- Settings dialog
- Level selections etc (allows for single player?)

And can we integrate the lobby into this or will it stay out of Spring?

Perhaps we can go to some system like BF uses: mod selection, single player, multi player, all in the same GUI.

jouninkomiko · Post by **jouninkomiko** » 21 Dec 2005, 03:37

i havent checked out the code to betalord's lobby, but if all of his functionality is outside in dlls, then skinning a lobby and embedding it into spring itself is not inconceivable.

As for the other features, those are more of a pre-game gui. atm i am focusing on the in-game gui, but other guis will be easier to put in. especially after i've gone through the trouble of learning cegui

Maelstrom · Post by **Maelstrom** » 21 Dec 2005, 04:11

I might look into making a skin. Dunno how good it will look, but we will see.

Weaver · Post by **Weaver** » 21 Dec 2005, 09:27

I have some ideas I'd like to try with this.

Maelstrom · Post by **Maelstrom** » 21 Dec 2005, 09:45

The lack of almost any sort of documentation whatsoever is hampering my efforts slightly. But I am stubborn, and will persavere. Good luck with your experiments Weaver.

Weaver · Post by **Weaver** » 21 Dec 2005, 09:56

The Falagard tutorial, for those who haven't found it yet.

http://www.cegui.org.uk/wiki/index.php/ ... umentation

Michilus_nimbus · Post by **Michilus_nimbus** » 21 Dec 2005, 11:56

Does this mean you're going to do a complete rewrite of the new gui?
Does this mean there's actually going to be a new gui?

Hurray!

Maelstrom · Post by **Maelstrom** » 21 Dec 2005, 12:05

Well now that I have remembered that all the GUI stuff is actually stored in the totala1.hpi or whatever it is, I have started to make some real progress.

And I did find those 'tutorials'. They suck.

DeathHawk · Post by **DeathHawk** » 21 Dec 2005, 12:12

its Finally happening The new GUI finally arriving i dont know about u guys but i am siked!!!!

!!!

renrutal · Post by **renrutal** » 21 Dec 2005, 14:19

/me imagines a perfect modular cl/g-ui interface combo that will revolutionize the RTS market

*yawn* too troublesome to code

Torrasque · Post by **Torrasque** » 21 Dec 2005, 15:08

Good luck Jouninkomiko.

I've got a little fear. All the skin I've seen was rough, thick. I liked the thinness of the "old newGui" and I hope something similar could be done.

What is your plan to incorporate this lib to Spring. It seem complicated

jouninkomiko · Post by **jouninkomiko** » 21 Dec 2005, 15:46

haha yes, it is very complicated. the problem at the moment is the lack of documentation and tutorials, but i am in the middle of discussions on the forum, and i am going to find their irc channel and ask enough questions to get started. the plan at the moment is to create the widgets needed for the base in-game gui, which can then have a variety of skins applied. if you like the way the gui looks right now... make a skin for it! the more skins we have, the easier it will be to test. my plan right now is to have an external application to run the interface for testing purposes. when it is functional enough, i will drag it into spring, and remove the old code that is no longer needed.

Artists should go here, to the bottom of the page.

http://www.cegui.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Tutorials

renrutal · Post by **renrutal** » 22 Dec 2005, 00:55

The very first skin is usually very complicated to get, but when you get it, it all downhill from there, for everyone.

Maelstrom · Post by **Maelstrom** » 22 Dec 2005, 02:01

OK ive done some of it, but this is just to tedious for me. If anyone else want to make continue making the skin, you can get what I have completed so far from here:
http://maelstrom.wik3d.com/files/Skin.7z

Just unzip that file into the CEGUI Demos/datafiles/imagesets/ directory after downloading http://www.cegui.org.uk/modules/mydownl ... d=4&lid=56

Good luck with it.
EDIT: Fixed links

renrutal · Post by **renrutal** » 22 Dec 2005, 10:59

Just one warning to the future CEGUI skinners:

Version 0.5 is coming and a lot of things will be dropped, so pay attention to what you're developing. Visit their site and check the Development Roadmap.

Weaver · Post by **Weaver** » 22 Dec 2005, 22:53

Maelstrom, the program is looking for png and you have given us a tga image. I changed the extension in the .imageset but I think the size might be wrong too.

Maelstrom · Post by **Maelstrom** » 23 Dec 2005, 02:27

Damnit, did i send the wrong file? OK, Now it should all work. Download the thing in the other post again. The PNG I was using was hidden off the side of the window. I really dont like this skinning program btw, but if it gets the job done...

renrutal · Post by **renrutal** » 23 Dec 2005, 08:04

Also for anyone who wants to test CEGUI in a standalone app first, I suggest downloading the CEGUI source code, and build the Samples directory.

Falagard demo and Demo8 are really great testing cases. Specially Demo8 which uses the Lua scripting language to handle all the gui code.

Jouninkomiko, you could use Demo8 as the basis of Spring's GUI code.

Spring RTS Engine

The New GUI

The New GUI