Recommended 2D GUI library
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/Recommended 2D GUI library
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| Can anyone recommend a 2D gui library? I'm wanting professional quality results (speed and accuracy of images, don't mind paying) which allows custom button graphics etc. and different control types. It also needs to be scaleable to different resolutions preserving the same aspect ratio. eg. I want a square frame for rendering a 3D view with controls on the right I'm browsing through the Toolbox/GUI libs at the moment, but would like real user feedback as well. Don't really want to try out a dozen different trial versions! |
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| I have the excellent BCF. It looks very nice, lots of functionality, easy to use. http://www.blitz3dfr.com/home.htm Also use sswifts gui system. Again excellent, but more aimed at huds rather than windows type stuff. There are some good free ones too (BlitzUI), but the two above are worth the price and suited my needs better than the free ones. Depends what you need really. |
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| BCF and BlitzUI... |
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| Thanks for the suggestions so far. One thing is these all appear to be windows based. Do you HAVE to have windows with borders, or do they work with a blank canvas and buttons plastered all over? |
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| Hmm.. Blitzui looks cool, n e one used it and now how it goes with b3d? do it run fast? |
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| works great! like a beast! its used in pacemaker and that runs very fast (at least on my comp) and thats in 3d... |
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| BlitzUI is excellent and its free. Runs as fast as any 2D system can within Blitz3D. Highly recommended for the price (free). BCF looks MUCH nicer and lots of features. Pretty sure some of the commands can be used without a window, check first though. Well worth the money if you want something that looks a bit different. Sswifts system is the fastest because it uses 3D rather than 2D techniques. Very flexible but requires more work by the programmer. Not windozy looking at all. Designed to be used on a 'blank canvas' (well, your 3D screen really). Very well commented which means you can learn alot by looking through the code. Also check out Chroma's free menu system, which I think is very good when used for what it is designed for. http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=24972 :) |
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| Runs as fast as any 2D system can within Blitz3D. Nope, it's not as fast as any 2D GUI can run in Blitz3D. It's slow. The -fastest- would probably be one that uses a DLL to draw the graphics directly to the images and calculate all the neccessary information pertaining to events and such, and then probably poke events into a bank. My 2D GUI draws neccessary bits into its own image (a buffer, so to speak) then draws visible portions to the screen. In doing this, you're not locking the back (or front) buffer as many times which Rect/Line/Text/etc. does in order to draw. Also, by doing this, I can have snazzy gradients and such- something that would be extremely costly for BlitzUI to use. If you have the cash, buy F-UI 3D. It's 3D, really fast, and you can set the alpha of windows. So you could just create a window that's the size of your screen, and then set its alpha to 0, where only its gadgets would be visible. It's cheap, so getting the money for it shouldn't be difficult. |
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| Apologies Noel ;) |
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| Be sure to try Night GUI from mouss38, it's free and very nice. At the moment it's quite slow IMHO, but as I quite like the GUI I've spent some time to tweak it in order to only do the minimal updates required to render everything properly (instead of rendering everything everytime; each window now has its own image), and it's now...faaaaaaast. Still some work to do, then I'll send it to mouss38 and if everything goes well this should be the next offical release. In a word, if you like the GUI's look and feel, forget the current (relatively) mis-performance and go for it. The link to the last offical release: http://smoussouni.free.fr/datafiles/Ngui/Ngui.htm Only downside for all non french speaker: currently there is no translation, so the comments and docs are all in french. Though this is pretty self-explanatory by the examples alone. |
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| Noel, are you still developing F-UI 3D? There are a few things I'd like to be able to do that aren't there---are you taking feature requests? |
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