ardor3d-ui up in svn

[renanse]

The new, Ardor3D based UI package that I've been working on over the last few weeks is finally up and ready for people to rip through it. You may have seen the goal of this UI system laid out in ticket 104, but if not, the gist is that it should be a simple, familiar looking system that will fit many devs needs out of the box, but also provide a foundation for devs that want to build more advanced components. I think this first cut begins to fulfill these points, but of course there is still a lot that can be done.

Please have a look over the API; this time I took more time with documentation and tried to make sure that everything is at least javadoc'd and commented and hopefully easy to understand. If you've used Swing or FengGui or other such systems, you should feel pretty much at home here. (For what it's worth, you may have seen on my blog a year or two ago that I'd done a UI system for work in the past and fortunately I was also able to draw a lot from my experiences working on that as well.)

Right now I'm mostly looking for feedback on the API itself and maybe functionality because look-wise it's still a bit rough (there's no look and feel support yet.) Skinning will come over the next two weeks or so though and should make things look a lot nicer. Also, if you would like to contribute or collaborate on improvements, let me know!

Some basic stats:

• Comes with a handful of basic widgets such as labels, buttons, panels, toggle buttons (radio/check boxes), frames (windows), and progress bars.
• Comes with layout managers: RowLayout, BorderLayout and AnchorLayout (first two should be familiar and the last one allows setting components relative to other components or their container.)
• Decorations include tooltips as well as image based, solid color and gradient backdrops and borders.
• Uses BMFont and BMText for text writing. (future plans include runtime - or preprocess time - generation of BMFont compatible images from system fonts.)
• UI is added to your app/game via adding an instance of UIHud - basically a manager for instances of our frame class. See SimpleUIExample or BubbleMarkUIExample for samples.
• Frames can cache their contents to texture, which can greatly reduce the rendering time for more complex UI (especially those that do not update every frame.)
• Frames support per frame transparency settings.
• Integrated with ardor3d's input and state tracking systems
• Component event system can handle at the component level things like mouse press/release, mouse enter/depart, mouse wheel, key press/release and focus receive/loss.
• Input not considered "consumed" by the UI can be setup to forward from the UI's LogicalLayer to a game or app's LogicalLayer.

[darkfrog]

You weren't kidding, it's very similar to Swing. You've got some good stuff in here, I look forward to seeing how it progresses. I didn't see any concept of a TextField/TextInput, is that coming soon?

[renanse]

Yes, I'd like to add textfields and/or areas, scroll panels, tabbed panes, sliders, indefinite progress indicators, combo boxes, modal dialogs and maybe menu items like popup menus.

[methius]

The absence of a UI framework was my primary reason for still sticking with Jme.
That being said, the absence of textfields and the like is still somewhat problematic for me.

Is there some kind of timeframe in which this will be implemented?
(Because I am looking to restart coding for several games in Ardor3D this summer)

Anyway, congratulations and many thanks for the hard work done so far.

[renanse]

Of the widgets I listed as desirous, textfield is definitely the #1 spot. I don't have any specific timeline, but I am willing to commit to at least having it in by 0.7.

[jeffpk]

When I get past the ascii walkmesh stuff im doing now hopefully Ill get a chance to start playing with it.

And crappy looking for now is fine by me. Functionality is alot more important to me at present.

[karmaGfa]

Hi,

I am also interested by functional progresses on text fields and text area style components.

I didn't download the source of Ardor3D yet, but if the ui lib is similar to swing, then that's really cool because that's exactly what I wanted to use.

[renanse]

FYI, skinning support is in and a "GenericSkin" is in place. You can see that now in svn via SimpleUIExample or BubbleMarkUIExample. Or you can just go look at a screenshot on my blog: http://blog.renanse.com/2009/07/skinnin ... -skin.html

[methius]

This is great. Thanks again for the hard work.

[khanstruct]

I sent you a PM. I'd be interested in lending my Photoshop skills to create a few additional skins. Using your existing template, I've already created one for our project with a cyberpunk feel. It hasn't been tested yet, and I'm sure it will require some tweaks, but if you could let me know some of the specs, I'd love to help out.

Nice work, by the way