CEGUI (Crazy Eddie's GUI) Forums

Hi everyone,

First, a reference: http://www.cegui.org.uk/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4620.

As in the above thread, I am hooking into a game in the attempt to draw a custom gui on top of the game. In the CreateDevice function, I initialize the CEGUI system using a Direct3D9Renderer. Before calling the Present function I call BeginScene, renderGUI, and EndScene followed by the original Present.

Initially, the gui is rendered and shows up on the screen. I was so ecstatic! However, once you proceed past the login screen, to the loading screen, the gui disappears. Continuing into the game itself the gui remains invisible. After logging out of the game and returning to the login or start screen, the gui will reappear.

While the problem encountered in the referenced thread is different, the cause of mine seems very likely to be one of states because of the nature of hooking into a third party application: you have pretty much no idea what it is doing.

The required information is as follows.



The reset of the initialization looks pretty typical. No errors show up (which makes sense because the gui shows up!).

A simple std::wcout call shows that renderGUI() is still being called even though nothing is showing up.

The referenced thread has two potential solutions to the problem.
1)

Another option you have is this:
1) When D3D first starts up (states at default), set the CEGUI states from initPerFrameStates, and record a state block.
2) Rewrite initPerFrameStates so instead of setting states, it applies the state block recorded above.
3) Do everything else the same as now.
4) ????
5 Profit!

2) Explicitly set the display size

Seeing how the gui is rendered initially it seems that (2) is unlikely, and that (1) is the likely solution.

I tried this and nothing changed. I also tried explicitly setting all render, sampler, and texture-stage states (below) to their defaults from the msdn documentation with no avail. What confused me about this was even though I did not restore the previous state, the game continued to function normally. While it is possible the game restores all states each frame, it seems unlikely. As such, this confused me.



So with no more ideas I've come to everyone here. I apologize if I've overlooked something simple; This is my first foray into Direct3D.

Thanks everyone.

I could imagine that the D3D9Device (this->m_device) was shut down. Add a check to the present method, if the device changes. If yes, shut down the D3D9Renderer and reinitialize it again.

I don't believe the device is changing. I added the following to the Present method and never saw it output. Also, if the device were shutdown, I would think that the gui would fail to reappear when moving back to the login part of the application (although this could be my lack of Direct3D knowledge speaking).



Thanks for the suggestion!

I see you're trying to reset the RenderStates manually before calling RenderGUI(), however the list is not complete.
Please check my post under viewtopic.php?f=10&t=5594 for what I did in the ts3overlay project.

You also might try the solution mentioned in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=5610

I didn't realize that the code block would enclose the text in a scroll bar if it got to long so I left out most of the SetRenderState calls. Here they are in full, with a couple of new calls that I pulled from your post (LightEnable, SetTextureState, SetVertexShader, SetPixelShader).


And this is the method used to apply the default state before rendering.


And even though rendering CEGUI wasn't causing any problems with anything else, I've modified the code around renderGUI to save and restore the previous state.


Last but not least, I tried disabling the AutoRenderingSurface.


None of the above seem to have had any effect.

For completness sake, here is the entire CEGUI.log.


When I have a chance I'm going to step through the renderGUI method and see if anything seems strange. What seems strangest to me is that nothing I do seems to have any effect on the game. When I have a bit more time I'm going to try and destroy its rendering to make sure I can, in case it has somehow created a device or swapchain that I haven't managed to wrap (even though the renderGUI function is still be called?!).

I have new, hopefully useful, information.

I do not believe that the state is the problem anymore. To come to this conclusion I added code that draws a 2D triangle after the call to renderGUI. Initially without the call to SetDefaultState, the triangle didn't render at all. I then found that setting the state to its default by calling SetDefaultState allowed the triangle to render. I proceeded to the point in the game where CEGUI stopped being rendered, and the triangle stopped rendering as well!!!

So even after setting the device to a state know to render the triangle, it won't render.

Next I went back to check that additional devices and swap chains aren't being created.

Repeated calls to GetNumberOfSwapChains show only one swap chain at anytime. Debug output in CreateDevice shows no other devices being created. I also added debug output to the IDirect3DDevice9::Present method. This method is never called (I have been doing all rendering in the IDirect3DSwapChain9::Present method).

Because I'm not sure what the difference is between the swap chain present and the device present, that will be my next avenue of investigation in case swap chains can do anything funny.

So I was able to solve this. Turns out that the last render target the application had set was a small surface that it was rendering to. In order to get CEGUI rendering properly I set the render target as the backbuffer, set the viewport properly, rendered, then presented. Everything seems to be working now.

Thanks for all your suggestions MarkR.