GUI renders in scene?

[Sesshomurai]

Hi,
I'm new to CEGUI and have been looking for components for a game I want to make. One cool thing I want to do is have the 2D UI be rendered inside the 3D engine scene. So I can mimic Vista style shifting/folding/moving UI's - like perspective. I want all the 2D widgets to be clickable even if my UI screen is bent at a perspective angle, zoomed out or zoomed in.

Is this possible in CEGUI? Do I have to render the UI onto a texture or 3D plane object to achieve it?

CEGUI has an Ogre renderer, so does this mean it already does this?

thanks,
Sessh

[Pompei2]

Hi, I dont know if this is somehow possible, but

CEGUI has an Ogre renderer, so does this mean it already does this?

no. It means that CEGUI uses the OGRE engine to draw the 2D widgets on the screen.

[Sesshomurai]

Ok, thanks for that info. I guess OGRE is a 3D renderer though. ?

[Rackle]

www.ogre3d.org

[Sesshomurai]

Yes. Ogre is 3D so I am wondering if CEGUI can render onto a plane or 3D poly to allow a UI screen to be moved, rotated, sized, etc. since it is already rendered in 3d ogre. I guess it would be like a texture then with input from the mouse translate onto the poly.

This would be really cool I think because you can still have 2D UI's but the windows themselves can be manipulated inside the 3D scene in useful ways (sorta like Vista is doing).

thoughts?

Sessh

[Pompei2]

Hmmm of course it would be a cool feature, but I think it's not (yet) worth the work, I'd first like to have a clean and properly working 2D GUI. maybe this could then be CEGUI 2.0 Properly translating the mouse-coords would be the hardest I think.

[Sesshomurai]

Ok. I think its something to think about because with the ogre rendered it is 90% capable of it. Translating the mouse coords to highest plane is already in ogre. So its nearly done!

Sessh

EDIT: This would be very next-gen UI for games. I don't know much about CEGUI design, but my guess is that the UI can be rendered onto a surface without much trouble. It probably is already. So if the drawing plane for a 3D poly can be acquired from OGRE, it can be painted onto it.