CEGUI Future Direction

[_mental_]

Just kicking of this thread.

[gcarlton]

CEGUI has come a long way, and its still my first choice for a game gui library. Hopefully its still going to be the official ogre gui library, and we'll continue to see an influx of people using it in their projects!

[lindquist]

Hi.

I'd like to get a bit more involved i CEGUI develpoment, and so I have started working on a full menu-system.

I'm doing it like stated in the roadmap, but since CE is no longer the boss, I'm thinking if the directions are still the same!

Are there new plans for CEGUI? or is the Roadmap still the general guideline ?

Thanx
-Tomas

[Guest]

When i see how active the community is, i don't worry about the future of CEGUI. No doubt it will live and continue to grow. We won't replace CE of course but there are plenty of guys here that are ready to keep his work up (and i'm one of them).

Long live CEGUI

--
Chris

[sfb]

I have to say that I'm sad to see CE leave. Writing the NeL driver changed the whole development dynamic of our project. I had a whole new respect for CE after enduring 6 mos of being a one-man GUI toolkit coder. It's not an easy job or a glamorous one. Nor is it often you get it as right as CEGUI is.

I'd like to see a few things on-going in the future.
* I'd like to see a more platform-oriented interface, like the renderer and resource provider interfaces we should probably look at other portions such as logging.
* I'd like to merge my NeL driver into the tree - maintaining it seperately has slowly become a larger than life hassle.
* I'd like to see (maybe I missed this) all signs of Xerces go away. It's a fat and slow library in contrast to what it's being used for in CEGUI.

That's probably it for now. (;

[Ayudo]

Respect to CE...
Anyways the GUI might need a new name (otherwise people will be confused, why its called "Crazy Eddie's").
So maybe call it "Customizable Easy GUI" or something - just keep the "CEGUI".

I will use it in my fresh project and hope to get some bugs fixed (as there are still some).

I guess the primary issue for further developement should be increase of speed. (maybe use buffers instead of render each image each frame)

But these are only some thoughts... Thanks _mental_ for taking over this *huge* project and I wish you the best!!!

[guyver6]

Hi guys,

Maybe I'm in a little shadow not participatin actively in development and on this forum, but I love CEGUI, and our team is using it extensively along with Ogre.

Anyway,

Ayudo wrote:
Respect to CE...
Anyways the GUI might need a new name (otherwise people will be confused, why its called "Crazy Eddie's").
So maybe call it "Customizable Easy GUI" or something - just keep the "CEGUI".

I will use it in my fresh project and hope to get some bugs fixed (as there are still some).

I guess the primary issue for further developement should be increase of speed. (maybe use buffers instead of render each image each frame)

But these are only some thoughts... Thanks _mental_ for taking over this *huge* project and I wish you the best!!!

This kind of post is a slap in a CE's face, IMHO.

First: name must not change, that's Paul's GUI system, and the fact he leaves the project doesn't mean we can now forgot how much work he put in it.

Second: until now CE was mostly alone developing that system, with other's little help and bug fixing. If you could fix some bugs, whole CEGUI's community would apprectiate it.

About performance there was a rough disscusion why the code isn't optimized at that stage.

CE: thanks for that system.
CEGUI: live long and prosper

Greetings,
Guyver

[Ayudo]

Hmm - it wasnt meant to be a slap - sorry if it appeares like that.
At this point once again thanks to CrazyEddie aka Paul, who really did a great job!

[gcarlton]

The name CEGUI has to stay! If anyone asks, we can say Eddie went Crazy working on it.

The main problem I see is that we may have too many devs now; the good thing CE did was filter the suggestions through his own single viewpoint. So the main question is, who gets to touch cvs?

[_mental_]

Thanks all for your continued support for CEGUI.

Just to quickly address a few of the above issues:

CrazyEddie's GUI won't be renamed even though CE is no-longer with us.

Yes this will remain the officially recommended GUI for OGRE. There's no reason for that to change.

For the time-being the roadmap should remain the same. This is a general guideline, but if someone wants to implement a specific feature they should feel free to go out of order. We'll revisit the roadmap in the near future (ie. when we've all setted down after this shake up).

I think most people know what CE's stance was on optimizing at this stage in the project. I take the same view, we should avoid the problems associated wit optimizing too early. The API and internals need time to settle down. Profiling the project will be done before 1.0.0 is released.

One of the major hurdles I see is keeping the support going in the forums. CE was a prolific poster, but I unfortunately don't have the time to do this though I will post when I can. If anyone wants to pitch in and help it would be very much appreciated.

@lindquist: Thanks for your continuing help with the project. See above for an answer to your roadmap question.

@gcarlton:
CE handed over the reigns to me so I will be directing the project. For the time-being CVS will be limited to the current project devs. I encourage everyone else to use the patch tracker.

@sfb: to answer your questions:

I believe CE was considering abstracting the internals so any XML library could be used rather than dumping xerces. I need to evaluate this myself, but it sounds ok to me atm.

One other thing I'm going to be doing in the near future is to reorganize CVS and setup a section for people to upload and maintain their own renderers outside of the project core. This would probably be a good place for your NeL renderer.

[zarthrag]

I've only recently learned how to "get around" in CEGUI, so I'm not aware of everything that's going on

But, obviously, the roadmap may need to be re-evaluated/considered. I kinda agree on the xerces thing - xml validation and the like should be done with tools prior to release, but that's (at heart) an optimization issue - something I advocate.

One thing *I* would like to see is a more detailed roadmap, and documentation. I know CE was more concerned with adding widgets, so maybe implementing the "Look/Feel" replacement along with data-driven widgets should be the "top" priority. It would be very nice to implement look/feel information pragmatically and/or via xml.

After that, I'd almost say *some* optimization would be in order - Namely in the rendering department.

just my 2cents,

-Anthony

[baxissimo]

CrazyEddie's GUI won't be renamed even though CE is no-longer with us.

Seeing as how it turns out the real Crazy Eddie wasn't even named Eddie, I see little reason for the name of the library to change. In fact, it should be the other way around. The current maintainer should change his/her name!

"Crazy Eddie" can become like the "Dread Pirate Roberts": whoever is in charge of CEGUI just *is* Crazy Eddie. That way Crazy Eddie will live forever!

[_mental_]

inconceivable

[gcarlton]

One of the major hurdles I see is keeping the support going in the forums. CE was a prolific poster, but I unfortunately don't have the time to do this though I will post when I can. If anyone wants to pitch in and help it would be very much appreciated.

I think if CE did less support and more coding he might have not been as burnt out. While the project is still at this early stage anyone using it should expect to have to figure things out themselves - the code is right there and tracing through it quickly shows how things are done.

So in short, it may suffer, but I'm not sure this would have a large impact on the project.

[Guest]

One of the major hurdles I see is keeping the support going in the forums. CE was a prolific poster, but I unfortunately don't have the time to do this though I will post when I can. If anyone wants to pitch in and help it would be very much appreciated.

The problem is that no one has enough knowledge to answer all questions. Even if we want to help, there will always be questions only CE can answer in a reasonable amount of time (i.e. not spending 6 hours browsing the code to solve the problem).

For the time-being CVS will be limited to the current project devs. I encourage everyone else to use the patch tracker.

Afaik, CE was the only one to have cvs access to the core system. gcarlton & scriptkid were working on the layout editor while lindquist had access to the scripting module.

I believe CE was considering abstracting the internals so any XML library could be used rather than dumping xerces. I need to evaluate this myself, but it sounds ok to me atm.

This is a typical example of what i said in my first point... You're talking about xerces without knowing that support for tinyXML already exists. Explanations here :
http://www.cegui.org.uk/modules/newbb/v ... st_id=3726

--
Chris