Re: [Glgui-dev] abstract rendering & more

[sfranke <sf...@us...>]

A quick note: I added viewable area to coordinate systems.  This allows
you to have a frame that is a window to a larger area.  Fairly basic
concept, but it took a considerable amount of rework on some of the class
relationships.  I also found a few big bugs.  It's all working now, but I
just have a simple demo, so there could still be problems.

I'm using OpenGL's scissor function to restrict rendering.  It requires
some extra work to keep track of screen and local coordinates, but it's
the best solution I could come up with.  It only scissors frames that need
it, so other frames are free (but should be expected not) to render
outside of their [0,1] area.

Now I'm going to write a textbox class for cleaner, more readable,
multiline text chunks (non button/titles).

and now to the reply:

On Wed, 14 Jun 2000, SiO2 Software wrote:
> Adding functionality if OK. What I was getting at was that developers don't
> want the GUI to suck more CPU than neccessary.

Hmm.. I'd have to test it in a real app before I could say for
certain.  Obviously the most complicated part is rendering (which I'm
planning on optimizing at some point), but I think the core UI code is
fairly efficient.  There are parts that could probably be redone later to
get more speed out of it.

> Make sure you don't forget about "LoadFromMemory()" style functionality. For
> example, I may have some data in my own file format (e.g. a Quake3 pk3 - AKA
> zip - file), so I would want to load the data into memory myself and pass
> the data to the GUI handler as a pointer.

Yup.  Might be another day before I get to that.  Do you have any ideas
for a format?  I was thinking a nice simple ascii format like quake3's
shaders would be nice, especially until we have a resource editor.

[sample implementation]
> I haven't looked at it yet. Have you put together another zip distribution
> yet?

No, I would have to make a release everyday to keep up with all the stuff
I'm adding.  I'm trying to aim at a fairly complete functionality level
before I make a full release.  That will include multi-platform demos and
better documentation.  Or maybe I could release another little sample just
for win32 with what's in CVS this weekend.


Scott Franke [druid-]
 sf...@gl...