CE-GUI branch: feature/ce-gui

[Ishmaru]

Actually, I was wondering with this new feature would it be possible to store new themes in the mod centre? It would be quite nice if the MG-user had an easy-to-add selection of themes to choose from that are created by the community )

I like the idea, but worried there wouldn't be much custom GUI development.

Also will combo boxes be implemented for map, faction, tileset and techtree selections?

[tomreyn]

Actually, I was wondering with this new feature would it be possible to store new themes in the mod centre? It would be quite nice if the MG-user had an easy-to-add selection of themes to choose from that are created by the community )

I like the idea, but worried there wouldn't be much custom GUI development.

I know little about CEGUI, but my understanding so far is that anything GUI logic related is 'baked into' the builds you produce, and the set of looks to select from is limited by the amount of themes which come with your build. It may not be necessary to rebuild to allow for team switching, actually Softcoder had added an INI option (for testing purposes) to allow for theme selection, so at least by restarting the game theme switching may be possible.

However, for now, we really need to focus on getting any one of the CEGUI looks (and Softcoder actually came up with a really good one IMO) working throughout the game. Since this involves programmatic changes it rules out many of us - but by no means all of us - who contributed to MG so far.

Also will combo boxes be implemented for map, faction, tileset and techtree selections?

Everyone else can learn to use CEED, the CEGUI presentation editor (read: easy enough to use, kind of like a WYSIWYG editor) and improve the menus and screens which have already been converted to CEGUI. I assume this will also allow for replacing existing UI elements by alternatives which use different input styles. As long as there are no logical changes and CEGUI supports it out of the box, it should be straight-forward.

The CEGUI branch of the megaglest-source repository provides a 'newly' added script which will build the CEGUI framework and the CEED editor on Linux (only, I don't know how to do it on Windows).

Code: [Select]

cd source/external-deps/cegui-source
./build-ce-gui-for-mg.shAfter building it, you also need to build MG itself, which will reuse parts of this earlier build.

The current code produces drop-down boxes on the custom game menu. Trying to change them to combo boxes seems like a good first objective in getting to know CEED. Give it a try!

[jammyjamjamman]

Actually, I was wondering with this new feature would it be possible to store new themes in the mod centre? It would be quite nice if the MG-user had an easy-to-add selection of themes to choose from that are created by the community )

I like the idea, but worried there wouldn't be much custom GUI development.

I know little about CEGUI, but my understanding so far is that anything GUI logic related is 'baked into' the builds you produce, and the set of looks to select from is limited by the amount of themes which come with your build. It may not be necessary to rebuild to allow for team switching, actually Softcoder had added an INI option (for testing purposes) to allow for theme selection, so at least by restarting the game theme switching may be possible.

However, for now, we really need to focus on getting any one of the CEGUI looks (and Softcoder actually came up with a really good one IMO) working throughout the game. Since this involves programmatic changes it rules out many of us - but by no means all of us - who contributed to MG so far.

Also will combo boxes be implemented for map, faction, tileset and techtree selections?

Everyone else can learn to use CEED, the CEGUI presentation editor (read: easy enough to use, kind of like a WYSIWYG editor) and improve the menus and screens which have already been converted to CEGUI. I assume this will also allow for replacing existing UI elements by alternatives which use different input styles. As long as there are no logical changes and CEGUI supports it out of the box, it should be straight-forward.

The CEGUI branch of the megaglest-source repository provides a 'newly' added script which will build the CEGUI framework and the CEED editor on Linux (only, I don't know how to do it on Windows).

Code: [Select]

cd source/external-deps/cegui-source
./build-ce-gui-for-mg.shAfter building it, you also need to build MG itself, which will reuse parts of this earlier build.

The current code produces drop-down boxes on the custom game menu. Trying to change them to combo boxes seems like a good first objective in getting to know CEED. Give it a try!

Well, it's nice to know that there may be possible way of adding custom themes, but yes I totally agree that there should be a focus on making one particular theme a replacement for the current setup.

Even if there wouldn't be much custom gui development around, I still think it'd be nice having the option available. But I must also admit, I only briefly looked at this topic and thought oh-pretty-graphical-program-for-easily-making-new-GUI's, I've never actually looked/ read/ thought deeply into how these kind of guis are developed 

[kagu]

I heard the CEGUI has some problems, what about http://mygui.info , is that an viable alternative. I saw some games like stuntrally etc , have it, and it looks fast , stable and feature rich.

[softcoder]

CEGUI is nice but some bugs that we encountered made me put a halt for now on that branch. I mentioned some of the problems in the irc channel for cegui, but i had no time to create defect tickets.

For now I will focus on releasing what we have related to other changes and not this stuff.