CEGUI Future Direction

[jacmoe]

I think it would be a good idea to construct a CEGUI Wiki.
The Ogre Wiki is awesome - and I think that CEGUI needs a place for tuts, snips and advice.
Good to hear that CEGUI is in good hands!

[lindquist]

I think that a WIKI would be a great addition to CEGUI.

Tutorials are really lacking, and newbies ask the same questions in the forums over and over again.

a WIKI could provide the basic knowledge for new CEGUI coders and would be a good way to get more people to use the library!

[_mental_]

ChrisKang wrote:
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).

Good point.

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.

In addition to CE I have full access to CVS. Exsortis has full access to the cegui_mk2 module as our OSX maintainer.

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

Yep, I have to admit that I have been out of the loop for a little while with recent CEGUI development. CE recently updated me so I have a clearer idea of whats been going on.

[_mental_]

gcarlton wrote:
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.

Agreed.

jacmoe wrote:
I think it would be a good idea to construct a CEGUI Wiki.
The Ogre Wiki is awesome - and I think that CEGUI needs a place for tuts, snips and advice.

Good idea.

[_mental_]

lindquist wrote:
Tutorials are really lacking, and newbies ask the same questions in the forums over and over again.

At this stage I don't think we should focus on tutorials. As gcarlton mentions above we should be aiming at our early adopters who are generally more knowlegable and can pickup and start coding with just the API doc. This shouldn't stop anyone from writing tutorials and uploading them to a wiki if they want to though.

[Malkyne]

Hi, gang. Sorry to see Eddie go. Luckily, I think we have a sufficient critical mass of users here to keep things kicking.

My team doesn't have a lot of time to do fresh development, but we are making some refinements, which we'll be releasing back into the wild. Also, if anyone needs help with Gamebryo integration, we'll be happy to swap tech notes, so definitely send 'em my way.

My team is really hurting for placement tools. I think that a few of us have already gone blind from editing huge xml files, and the only editors we've been able to find haven't really been sufficient. I'd say that, in our experience, the lack of tools is probably the biggest shortcoming we've encountered with using CEGUI in a full scale game project. While I imagine (from some of the earlier discussion) that this is probably not a short-term goal for most of you, I do think that it's a very important long-term goal, for the overall health of this project and its community.

I agree that a Wiki is a good idea. I'm sure a lot of us have hints and tips we'd like to share (e.g. I figured out a way to add rendered textures to a GUI without any modifications to core CEGUI).

Anyway, that's my 5 cents (we don't have pennies in Australia anymore ).

Tess

[Mike]

Are there any plans to port this to dev-CPP?
I don't like visual studio, and don't know how to make a project with this in dev-cpp

[Sarev0k]

I'm surprised this hasn't been asked, but the posting of this topic on April 1st seems rather suspicious.

Are you fooling around with us, or is Crazy Eddie really gone?

[gcarlton]

I did have the same thought, but if its an April fools joke, its a very long and drawn out one. Still, there's always the glimmer of hope that CE will return one day, shouting "surprise!".

[_mental_]

From this thread:
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... highlight=

CrazyEddie wrote:
Just to confirm It's not some kind of elaborate April fools gag, I am stepping aside for the foreseeable future.

[CrazyEddie]

Hello everybody, nice to see things continuing in my absence

gcarlton wrote:
Still, there's always the glimmer of hope that CE will return one day, shouting "surprise!".

I'll never rule out returning to the project at some point in the future, though if it were to happen it would not be for many, many months and also I would not return in the role as "all hands person", I'd just write the code.

You may see me pop up from time to time, as I'll always be interested in the direction that the project goes; just that for the moment I have no desire to continue the role I held for two years.

@lindquist:
Your menu system looks awesome, well done

CE.

[leedgitar]

Hey all. I can see I have really been out of the game for awhile now since I just now heard about the changes. For one, CEGUI is simply the best in game GUI system that exists, not only because of what is there now, but also because of what is possible in the future because of the top quality design. Since I've done the largest part of the C# port, I'd also be happy to be on board as part of the GUI team in general to help ensure things keep moving.

Enjoy the time away from the project Paul, and I hope to see you back in some shape or form in the future I think the time away from Axiom has done some good for my sanity .

[paddy]

It is a great system and its really easy to add to, so I am sure people will keep adding to it instead of try to reinvent the wheel.


One thing I would like to see is (though I maybe missing it just by not looking in the right place) is more progress reporting on a feature level. The 0.3.x is slated for this summer but the other features - but I suspect that as people work on things to add to CEGUI that they themselves need that we'll have more parallel development, and it would be nice to be able to have the multiple endeavors tracked independantly.


I wrote some dynamic layout helper classes a while back (I am still learning to use C++ well, so its a bit ugly) and if it can be benefitial for the base CEGUI I'd be happy to put the time into modifying it as needed. I am not sure if the methods are adaptable or not.

http://www.cegui.org.uk/modules/newbb/v ... st_id=2331

Some features need to be added successively of course that build on prior ones, but having a forum thread in the development area that has a sticky much edited first post, that lists concurrent projects and highly desired features that are doable put not on the list because of time constraints, we may get more people offering to code those features too.

[brcolow]

I agree, and maybe to track these things it would be beneficial to have a Wiki/Bugzilla. Loosing the project lead is hard to cope with, I think the best thing is organization at this point. Then re-work the roadmap to reflect the changes of CE being gone. Then start getting developers, then it will fall in to place. But, without organization the project will fall apart.

[craigp]

Hi all -

My primary dev box went down a couple weeks ago (hard-drive crash, rather unfortunately), so I've been trying to continue writing my game with my laptop. In doing so, I discovered that the graphics library I had been using (Open Scene Graph) didn't work with the geforce2 card.

So, I've dug around quite a bit, and ogre + cegui looks like one of the most promising options. Unfortunately, while my laptop can run most of the ogre demos reasonably well, when I try running the ogre gui app, the framerate drops to under 3 fps. Needless to say, that's not ideal.

So, my question is, would it be possible to get reasonable performance from cegui? What, if anything, can I do to improve the sample?

I'm not trying to complain; I'm also willing to put a bit of work into it, since I've liked what I've seen of cegui and want to see it succeed, but if it's just not going to be feasible for my current project then I'll probably have to look into other options for now (maybe wxWidgets or SDL).

thanks!
--craig