RE: [GD-General] Vector GUIs
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RE: [GD-General] Vector GUIs
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From: <phi...@pl...> - 2003-04-05 03:06:03
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We use flash for our HUD's and menus. IIRC The Star Wars Starfighter guys
did as well. I think you can get a flash renderer as middleware now, but we
rolled our own from the specs (which are publicly available somewhere).
Cheers,
Phil
"Greg Seegert"
<greg@stainlessst
eelstudios.com> To
Sent by: <gam...@li...urcef
gamedevlists-gene orge.net>
ral-admin@lists.s cc
ourceforge.net
Subject
RE: [GD-General] Vector GUIs
04/04/2003 04:56
PM
Please respond to
gamedevlists-gene
ra...@li...urcef
orge.net
Performance wise, I think you hit the nail on the head with the problems
you
described. You could forbid the use of alpha or varying levels of opacity
on your UI elements, which could obviously help fill rate if you z-test.
I'd design the UI for one resolution - say, 1024x768 - and if you're
rendering a background, split the texture up into 12 256x256 textures.
Then
let the gfx hardware handle the scaling for different resolutions. Results
are pretty good. And this may not be too practical, but the more ui
elements that shared the same texture the better. You could batch em all
up
and avoid doing much texture swapping on the hardware. That method would
obviously work better for ui elements which have a small piece of a texture
tiled over them rather than a full background for example, but it looks way
better than an untextured quad =)
As an aside: I'm not sure if it was here or on the algorithms list, but I
think I recall someone mentioning something about a SWF renderer. SWF is
the flash file format, which basically means you'll have a layout tool
pretty much written for you already.
-----Original Message-----
From: gam...@li...
[mailto:gam...@li...]On Behalf Of
Brian Hook
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2003 7:26 PM
To: gam...@li...
Subject: [GD-General] Vector GUIs
So I've been thinking about this whole scalable GUI thing some more,
and the "obvious" solution is to do something like make the GUI in
some kind of vector language so that it can scale.
This has a large number of advantages, and the biggest disadvantage
is that you can't do real nice pixel/raster effects such as the
various filters available for Photoshop. Instead they'd have to be
described procedurally, which might be considered fairly limiting. A
combination of FreeType fonts coupled with vector GUI descriptions
would seem to allow a great degree of scalability while keeping
things relatively sane for the artist.
To develop the GUI you could use a standard vector drawing package
that exports to a parseable file format such as AI, EPS or SVG. Then
you either load the file directly or run it through a filter to some
local file format such as a Lua script. Since SVG is XML-based, you
can easily allow the artist to tag functions for the GUI components
by embedding a key, or you could simply cheese out and tag it as part
of the object ID.
The most difficult part of the process that I can think of is
actually rendering the GUI on modern hardware. Obviously pixel
plotting is straight out, so you'd probably construct the GUI
elements into textures and use those. My biggest concern is that
this can eat up a ton of texture space, especially if you have alpha
(precluding the use of 16-bit texture information).
Take a situation where you have a 1280x1024 fullscreen application,
and your total GUI elements come up to an overdraw of 4x (a lot of
the GUI elemenst would presumably be in the form of dialog boxes,
etc. that are temporal). Assuming you wanted the entire GUI cached,
this could easily add up to a lot of texture memory consumed for a
high-res display. Obviously you could rasterize into temporary
bitmaps and use liberal amounts of texture destruction, but that
still seems like a lot of overhead just for a GUI. The problem, of
course, being that since this is scalable, the higher your screen
resolution the more texture memory is consumed by your GUI elements.
Thoughts, comments and "you're smoking crack" comments appreciated.
Brian
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