BlitzMax Gui
BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Beginners Area/BlitzMax Gui
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| I'm still contemplating buying Bmax. What I didn't see on the products page was anything about GUI support, does bmax have built in gui like Blitz+, as in windows menus, etc., skinnable apps, windows with your own custom shapes, that kind of thing? sorry, if this already been answered. |
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| There's a module coming out for this (I assume it will cost), apparently being tested this week. |
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| As stated, MaxGUI is not yet released, but it's anticipated soon (my guess though is ~2 months)... it will cost a bit extra, although I *think* it is going to have a very low price point. I am of course guessing. Meanwhile, there are a number of 3rd party GUIs available at the moment. Check out the BlitzMax Showcase forum. |
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| Try IGlass, it is fantastic ! Or alternatively, wait for MaxGUI. |
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| okay, thanks...? what I'm trying to ask is there going to be an actual built in windows gui (or is there already) for blitzmax. I.E. windows menus, popups, and the ability to make custom shaped windowed applications. I don't mean like a program gui like BCF or something. ?? |
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| That will be possible with the official GUI which should come out soonish (but which isn't free). The MaxGUI uses system native GUI, WinAPI, Cocoa and FLTK |
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| soonish but not freeish oh well. at least it's something-ish. |
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| As non-free-ish as it might understandably be, it's never a good idea to have too much of a conversation about pricing for Blitz stuff if it's not with a BRL spokesperson - as well all know. Just to mess with your mind, though, I was actually under the impression that the GUI module was one of those that were more likely to be free than the others, in fact. My head may very well be in the toilet as much as anyone else's though. :o) |
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| There are currently at least two active threads about the pricing of additional modules from BRL, probably best to have that conversation in one of them? http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=50330 and http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=50332 |
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| It may have been up in the air at one point as to whether MaxGUI would be charged for or not, but latest confirmation from BRL indicates that there will be a price, although it's unknown what it will be of course. |
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| I'm not trying to start another Pricing Woes thread. What I'm really interested in is what the full functionality will be and how many modules it will take to accomplish that. |
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| it doesn't mater how many modules will be created in the future from BRL. Mark if he wands can stop development right now and shut down the whole site. Needs and Comforts will never be enough for a solo dreamer how wands to be a game developer |
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| OK CodeD... here is what I know. It's not much. MaxGUI's early work-in-progress name was 'the BlitzPlus module'. So one is to assume that on win32 it has at least all the features of BlitzPlus, if not more. The decision to support native/Cocoa on Mac has been a fairly recent one, so it will be interesting to see just how advanced MaxGUI-Mac will be. None of that sounds very impressive, however on Linux BRL decided to use FLTK, now if you look that up, it's pretty damn impressive (I assume you can also use FLTK on Win32 AND Mac per personal preference - key word here is assume). So from this it sounds like the module may not be too flash on Win32 or Mac. But what we do know is that there will be an all-encompassing command set - so depending on how well they've wrapped FLTK, we could have a very powerful module on our hands - since functionality has to be the same for all 3 platforms. On the other hand, it could be that the win32/fltk/cocoa modules are very minimalist with only enough content to get the 4th all-in-one wrapper module to work. If this is the case, being that it's open sourced, it still won't have the same problems BlitzPlus has. I also have heard vague reports of using Max2D/Max3D (circle one, or both, or something) in combination with a MaxGUI window (canvas style, I would assume). However, I can't remember if this was a 'this is what we hope to do' vague report or a 'we have this sort of working at the moment' vague report. Having said all of that, the best example of what MaxGUI can do at the moment is the only preview of it in action that's floating around - the MaxIDE (on Linux/Win32 only). The MaxDemo is not the latest version of Max, but I don't think the IDE changed too much in later versions. |
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| So from this it sounds like the module may not be too flash on Win32 or Mac. But surely as Max is supposed to be cross-platform, the GUI module needs to provide the same functionality on all three platforms? Can't really see how that's going to work with a GUI as each system has it's own native style. I'm looking forward to the GUI module but I'm also reserving judgement until I actually the same code running side-by-side on my PC and my Mac. |
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| why not? Max2D does it as well and has totally different implementations on each OS. You again only get the "high layer" of the module, the OS dependent part won't be visible as long as you are not going to dig through the C sources |
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| Thanks for the info Van. I think I'll wait it out for now. |
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