Ten minutes of your time and I'll make you a treasure of ski

[centipede]

Hi all, remember me? I was quite excited about making skins some time ago, but decided to postpone the last bit until Falagard was in place. Well, so it is now, but I'm stuck in two places (remember that these days I'm more of on artist than a coder):

1) I can't compile any renderers in linux. My configure script just writes this:

Code: Select all

configure: OpenGL renderer enabled
checking for iluFlipImage in -lILU... yes
configure: Image loading via DevIL by OpenGL renderer enabled
configure: Use of OpenGL in Samples is disabled
checking for CEGUIOGRE... checking for CEGUI_NULL... configure: Use of Ogre3D in Samples is disabled
checking for main in -lIrrlicht... no
checking for XF86VidModeQueryVersion in -lXxf86vm... yes
configure: Irrlicht renderer disabled
checking for GTK... yes
configure: GTK2 renderer selection dialog in samples is disabled
configure: No renderers available.  Building of samples framework and applications has been disabled.
configure: creating ./config.status


All I need is a simple SDL+OpenGL binary for my Ubuntu Breezy box that I can test skins against!

2) The Falagard manual is quite large. Somewhere was a note that the current gui-editor would be extended with a skin-editor too. If so, I'd rather wait for the proper solution than trying to update my PyGTK script for that purpose. (Ok, these days I'm on FLTK, so making a new tool with a small binary is not TOTALLY impossible, but as said it would be better to wait for the pros).

[3) A little guidance in making the first skins]
-------

What a shame because these cuties still await:

http://artcamilla.dk/vaultage/projects/ ... istic1.jpg
http://artcamilla.dk/vaultage/projects/ ... istic2.jpg
http://artcamilla.dk/vaultage/projects/ ... istic3.jpg
http://artcamilla.dk/vaultage/projects/ ... orror1.jpg
http://artcamilla.dk/vaultage/projects/ ... ieval2.jpg
http://artcamilla.dk/vaultage/projects/ ... hnoid1.jpg

I'm sorry that I haven't been able to finish them as I promised. They are just so perfectly... Falagard'ish!

-Centipede

[martignasse]

1°)
Can't help you to much on this cause i'm not on linux, but it seem's that all you'r renderers modules are disabled.

2°) and 3°)
I think the best way for now it to adapt the topologie of you'r skin images to one off existing, Taharez or Windows
i don't recomande you Vanilla cause it's far for complete.

This way, you minimise the amount of modifications in the .imageset file,
and haven't to tweak .scheme and .looknfeel files.

The other way is the brute force one.

I'am trying to make a complete guiset from scratch and can tell you it's a lot of learning about the Falagard system,
wich is good cause the old one will be deprecated in next release.

Maybe i can help you integrate them, if you want.

anyway, good skins, keep up the good work.

[CrazyEddie]

Hi,

1) You have the OpenGL renderer built, but it's not used in the samples because the configure can't find the glut development libs - install glut, re-run configure, make etc, and all should be well

2 & 3) The Falagard manual is indeed quite large And the first section of that is the best introduction to creating a new xml falagard skin. The tool to which you refer is a sub-project of mine, and to be honest, I'd rather a 3rd party did it. Anybody waiting for me to finish mine will be waiting a loooooong time

As martignasse says, the current xml skins are also a good reference to how these things should be constructed.

From 0.5.0 the old C++ module versions of TaharezLook and WindowsLook will no longer exist.

Your skin imagery definitely looks cool, and I do hope you get these running under falagard, as that would be awesome

[centipede]

It worked!

See what I can do about that skin editor in my spare-spare-spare-time

[lindquist]

The #cegui IRC channel would be a good place to go if you need help.
It's pretty active, and you could very likely find the answer to your questions there if the manual is'nt enough!

[centipede]

Wow, this spec is just impressive. It will take a long time before all the power of Falagard has been unleashed!

@CrazyEddie: I'm just being curious about your motivation for the current DimensionOperator scheme that you chose. Wouldn't it be more traditional to make an operator tree?
((a + b) * (c + d))

If I have understood it correct, the current scheme always forces a "right-associative" priority over things:
(a + (b * (c - (d + e))))

Was that not also harder to implement? Not to mention the fact that there is no way to specify a balanced operator tree as in the first example. Or did I misinterpret the documentation?

[centipede]

In answer to my own question, it actually comes quite natural to think in terms like that: You start by establishing a value, then you modify it with a DimOperator and another value (which in turn can consist of several calculations - in this context the scheme of evaluating the innermost values first turns out to be quite natural)

I have started to add additional information about skin-creation on the wiki: http://www.cegui.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Creating_Skins

[centipede]

Yummy, this is getting sweet. Ok, two notes for the developers:

1) Please print the full error output when parsing looknfeel files. If there is an error - even gross semantical or syntactical ones, all I get is "..no WindowFactory is available for ..." which is too little to debug effeciently from

2) This actually dates back from the days of TaharezLook: The images of the mouse cursors for resizing should really be centrered around the pointer if they are of the <==> kind. Note that the property used is EWSizingCursorImage, which rules out a EastSizingCursorImage, e.g. =|

[spannerman]

Hey centipede, just wanted to say your skins you have started there indeed look very yummy, especially SkinFuturistic2.jpg

Thank God we have an artist type working on this here, all hail the centipede!

[centipede]

Thx. I'll be off to work now, but here:

http://artcamilla.dk/vaultage/projects/ ... nux.tar.gz

is the first humble stabs at creating the xml files needed. For linux/SDL+CEGUI folks it contains a complete example that should compile and run. If anybody tries it, comments are appreciated.

[centipede]

Follow the link above for the latest update. Now it has:
Button, radiobutton, checkbox, editbox, listbox, statictext, horizontal/vertical scrollbar, mousearrows, framewindow, I can't test the listbox nor the combobox because I don't know how to put items into them from the .layout file.

The combobox lacks the dropdown button. I'm confused about it. Say we have a combobox like this:

Code: Select all

      ________________________
     / editbox       | button \
     --------------------------
     | dropdown list           |
     |                         |
     \________________________/


It is the button that puzzles me. Say I have drawn this gfx:

Code: Select all

      ________________________
     /               |        \
     --------------------------


and a couple of arrows for the various states:

Code: Select all

      v V \/


How should it be cut up? Since the editbox, the button and the dropdown are children of the combobox and it in fact doesn't draw anything itself, I should think that I needed to create three buttons, like this:

Code: Select all

     ____    ____     ____
     | v \   | V \   | \/ \
     ------  ------  -------


But it seems to work even if I just put the entire:

Code: Select all

      ________________________
     /               |        \
     --------------------------


..into the editbox (as a "new" Editbox widget: ComboEditbox

[centipede]

...Oh, and you people could speed things up tremendously if you started to post xml fragments that could go into the test layout. I don't know how to create Combobox+items, Listbox+items, Menus, ScrollablePane ... from .layout files.

I don't even know what a scrollable pane is???

Thanks in advance.

[martignasse]

hi,

...Oh, and you people could speed things up tremendously if you started to post xml fragments that could go into the test layout. I don't know how to create Combobox+items, Listbox+items, Menus, ScrollablePane ... from .layout files.

For now, you can't put item in Combobox and listbox by xml because the item of those aren't based on a window widget.

It will change with the next release from what lindquist said in this thread, post #13

Currently I'm working on a "prototype" of a new listbox widget that is not implemented using "items". Instead it uses plain windows for content. These are inherited from ItemEntry which provides the interface to allow automatic layout.

For the rest, i planned to start some kind of xml snippet in the wiki with example for each widget....
but you can already found a xml menu example in this thread, post #5 (result from forum research with "layout menu") :

Code: Select all

<Window Type="Look/Menubar" Name="MainMenu">
       <Window Type="Look/MenubarItem" Name="MainMenu/Item1">
              <Property Name="Text" Value="Item1"/>

              <Window Type="Look/PopupMenu" Name="MainMenu/Item1/Menu">
                    <Window Type="RastullahLook/PopupMenuItem" Name="MainMenu/Item1/Item1">
                          <Property Name="Text" Value="Item1"/>
                    </Window>

                    <Window Type="Look/PopupMenuItem" Name="MainMenu/Item1/Item2">
                          <Property Name="Text" Value="Item2"/>
                    </Window>
              </Window>
        </Window>
    </Window>
</GUILayout>


and for an idea of what a Scrollpane is, i just picked this from the API Reference::ScrollablePane->Detailed description :

The ScrollablePane widget allows child windows to be attached which cover an area larger than the ScrollablePane itself and these child windows can be scrolled into view using the scrollbars of the scrollable pane.

Hope it help

[martignasse]

oops, and for clarifications on the combobox :

it's in the looknfeel you should make the DownArrow icon.

you can look in the WindowLook.looknfeel to take example :

at line 608, you have the beginning of the Combobox definition.

at line 657 you have the definition of the dropdown icon referrencing to the imageset portion of the DownArrow.

for the definition of other state, you have to populate the stateimagery section at line 667, 668 and maybe new ones like "over" and so one.

[centipede]

I wanted the menu to work like this:



But ended up with something like this:



I haven't added the PopupMenu in the .layout file (the program crashed (SDL Parachute) when I did)

EDIT: I figured it out! CEGUI calculates the area of the MenuItem as the part of the ItemRenderArea of the Menubar that covers the text. CHECKING... Nope. If I set the ItemRenderArea of the Menubar to TopEdge=0, BottomEdge={1,0} my MenuItem graphics still lacks a few pixels in top and bottom. Hmm.