Hi,

I have written a lot of custom UI controls and have been toying with the idea of seeing if I can get things like list boxes, combo boxes, buttons, scroll bars, etc to work with 3DGS.

What I would like to achieve is kind of a dialog/forms interface that could be used for user input.

I am not sure if it is possible from the SDK or not, I can not remember how easy it is to capture mouse events and keyboard events from a plug in.

I recently wrote several new custom controls from scratch and it got me thinking about porting them to a plug in for 3DGS. If I do this is there any interest ?

I note that something like this is lisited in the forecast as low priority. I would think it is a good idea. My only suggestion is if you do make these then consider doing so in a way that the fonts/images or whatever for the UI elements are all editable so that the user could easily alter the style. In other words having checkboxes that looked like windows checkboxes might not be as appealing as if I could make them look like wood, steel etc by changing a graphic.

Good luck.

I saw that it was low in the forecast but they are things that I think help polish a game. From the lack of response I can see why Conitec has them on low priority

Activity on the forums is a little lighter but I don't think that means the UI components are not of interest. -makes sense to me as most game have some sort of interface if only for the settings and so on. Maybe you can use the 'SourceForge concept' and create a thread in Teamwork , propose a series of controls, post whatever you have and invite people to modify, improve or build controls and post code in that thread. If there was any significant involvement from the more knowledgeable -even if only to point out small improvements you might eventually end up with a nice library of stuff. Of course this might be a lot of work if there isn't enough interest.

Things do seem to be a bit slow on the forum. But it seems to me that a nice UI with dialogue boxes would be a big hit. I think most people need that for the startup phase of the game, if for no other reason.
Are you thinking of using the SDK to make a plugin, or use a script or what?
Anyway, I would encourage you to continue, JayG.

For the types of things I am thinking about it would have to be through the SDK. I am going to do some testing next week to see if I can get the events that I need.

Very interested JayG, sounds like an idea that would go down well once users understood what this will do for them.
Cheers.

JayG, Go for it. I hate doing things the hard way, and that is all that is available with this engine at the moment. Tools like the Virtual Panel Maker are true sanity savers, and what you are discribing would be awesome. I would appreciate it, and put you on my growing list of "peeps to send a cheer out to".

Don't let the lack of response slow you down. Folks are all at different stages of development, and so often we see "Hey who wants <insert gee-whiz item here>?" Only to spend weeks, months and in some cases years helping, encouraging, hoping, before it comes to light that what was planned was just too hard, large or time consuming to come to fruition. (I think some AI [not mythic] efforts and TUSC serve as good examples) It can be demoralizing, and nibbles at one's online confidence...

It is often better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt, so to say.

Mark

The lack of response depends also on the difficulty to imagine what 'UI controls' could be like. Me as a german for example I even don't no what are 'UI controls' at all.

Quote:

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It is often better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt, so to say

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I guess it is too late for me then.

I have proceeded to work on it and things have gone very well. I can now dynamically create a new canvas with controls on it or read it in from a file. I am in the process of hooking up an event system so that c-script can react to a button being clicked or a new item in the list box being selected. It is kind of fun having a draggable dialog inside of GameStudio.

Thanks for the encouragement.

pappenheimer --

A better verbal description

I am creating a set of GUI controls for use with 3D GameStudio. If anyone has used a windows Dialog or the Torque GUI system you should be familiar with what I am creating. I am curious what people think about something like this

The idea is to create a Canvas/Dialog and then place controls on it, (button, list box, and labels, border, picture, check box, radio button, menu). Control placement and settings are defined from a definition file.

Each control can have one of 9 different border types, a background image, a starting and stopping gradient color to draw the background in. All colors have an alpha component so controls that range from opaque to transparent are easily created by adjusting the alpha value.


Here are a couple of older screen shots so you can visually see what I mean.

Here are some images from my very first test with a couple controls. The first one is completely opaque and the second one is partially transparent