Possible upcoming features

[Samah]

Hi guys,

I'm working with the client development team over at Project Wish, and we're currently using CEGUI (with Ogre) as our widget toolkit.
There's some features we're going to need in the long run which are currently not supported by CEGUI (or are still in development), so we're thinking about developing our own toolkit to more closely match our requirements.

My question is, what are the long-term plans for widgets and features such as:

* Popup Menus (I've seen a thread regarding this)
* Pie Menus
* Trees
* Tables
* Keyboard accelerators
* Advanced layout managers

We've got a bit of a dilemma here as we don't know whether to stick with CEGUI and hope that it will fully meet our requirements in the near future, or to continue with the in-house widget toolkit (some design work has already been done).

Thoughts?

Samah

[spannerman]

I honestly dont know how fast new widgets will be added to CEGUI, or how the overall development will progress. As you may have noticed, things have slowed down a lot recently here, but this project is far from dead.

The only thing I can suggest is that since you have just started an in-house widget toolkit, why not help continue improving CEGUI by adding the missing features to it yourself instead of starting your own from scratch?

I think after the departure of Crazy Eddie himself, CEGUI really needs as much help from the community as possible to keep it going strong. Actually, I hope that Eddie will return one day, but instead of wasting time hoping for that day we really need to take action ourselves. Alot of very good work has gone into CEGUI, and as it stands now its a very powerful GUI - I use it myself for everything that requires a gui. I know that the new CEGUI leader _mental_ will do only good things for this project (and we are extremly thankful he offered to take this role), but if I was to guess I'd say that since he's also a core OGRE developer he probably does not have a great deal of time to devote to CEGUI.

I guess what Im trying to say is, if youve got the time to dedicate towards development of a GUI toolkit, then use it on improving CEGUI. It would take a huge amount of time to build something from scratch that meets the capabilities and flexibility of CEGUI, so why not avoid recreating the wheel and add to whats aleady available.

Just my two Pence

[Samah]

Helping out with the development of said features is actually something we'd thought of, I just neglected to mention it - doh!
As it stands this could very well be the best option, since we already have a great deal of the client coded around CEGUI.
I'll apprise my team leader of the situation and we'll see what transpires

[spannerman]

Yaay!

Good luck, I hope you guys decide to go down this route. Any contributions you make will be very much appreciated by everyone using CEGUI.

[lindquist]

What's a pie-menu ?

I'm working on the menu system, but I have no idea what this is...

[Samah]

Pie menus are also known as radial menus in some gui systems.
Think Neverwinter Nights, Temple of Elemental Evil, EVE Online, etc.