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Thread: lazarus and opengl gui?

  1. #11
    cool
    biggest advantage of flash menus would be easy creation of layout and animations/transitions for it

  2. #12
    PGD Staff / News Reporter phibermon's Avatar
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    Scaleform? what an utterly horrid corparate cash-cow designed to retain flash development skills that are otherwise totally defunct (not general art skills of course).

    You wouldn't need scaleform if flash provided a sane interface for parsing the per frame content

    Flash became popular not for it's graphical capabilities (Fantavision was doing that on the Amiga when I was a child) but it's extensive and highly optimized mechansims for compressing that data down for web use - a feature that is not needed in a game already spanning 20gb, it's only about making use of existing flash developers and I use the term developer very, very lightly.

    The truth of the matter is if some company came out with somthing as good flash tomorrow but actually licenced the source code, then both flash and scaleform would die a quick death. But they never do come out with somthing as good as flash, because they always decide that a 3D flash is the future, totally forgetting that 90% of artists don't do 3d.

    Sorry - off topic I know but scaleform really angered me. Scaleform converts a horse into a car by putting a car body onto the horse and painting wheels on it's hoofs, and all because the company that sells the horse refused to give you the reigns. or somthing like that.
    When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.

  3. #13
    still looks like an easiest way to have a fancy looking menu?

  4. #14
    PGD Staff / News Reporter phibermon's Avatar
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    Given the content tools available and assuming you can afford it all then yes, without a doubt the easiest way to do fancy menus and the such, have access to a world of artists that are familiar with the tools etc I can't deny that.

    But Flash itself is a blight on this civilization.

    the utterly abysmal code quality has resulted in somthing like 10 of the 10 greatest zero day hacks ever.

    It would be best for all of humanity if Flash were scorched from the surface of the earth, ironically, in a blinding flash.

    If Flash were a man, I'd pity that man, I'd walk over to him and push money into his hand so he can get a good meal and a bed for the night.
    When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.

  5. #15
    Co-Founder / PGD Elder WILL's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by phibermon View Post
    I'll be releasing my engine in the next few months, part of the source that I'll might be making available is my GUI which is as feature rich as any realtime OpenGL GUI currently available.....

    Anyway, I'll stop with the hard sell now and present some screen-shots :

    Attachment 1122Attachment 1123Attachment 1124
    Hey, nice GUI!
    Jason McMillen
    Pascal Game Development
    Co-Founder





  6. #16
    Why in hell would you like to include flash code into pascal application? This would only introduce more problems if for instance end users won't have necessary runtime libraries to run this flash code on their computers. Not to mention the fact that you would be forced to seperately debug pascal and flash based code.

    Creation of layouts and animations in OpenGL isn't as hard as it seems.
    Example of how to create slidable menu:
    1. Render the whole menu to special texture usually refered as RenderTexture.
    2. Create Quad with desired dimensions.
    3. Render the Menu texture onto the Quad either using scaling (streching efect) or partial rendering (sliding efect).
    Verry similar process is used in FireMonkey. But the biggest probem of FireMonkey is that every controll is seperate single texture rendered on a Quad. That's why when you ZoomIn on FM panel the othervise few pixel thich borderline becomes several milimeter thich black line on the screen (verry ugly by my opinion).

    As for UI layout it is only up to you how will you make it.

    Since most graphic engines nowadays do have support for RenderTextures you can use theese for optimizing the RenderingRoutine. How?
    Lets say that you want to have your games UI divided into several sections where each of this sections is actually created from many small componets (pictures). If theese sections doesn't change often it would be more eficient to render seperate sections into RenderTextures and then update this texture only when necessary. So if section is othervise composed from 10 pictures you can save upto 9 "DrawPictureHere" cals when this section hasn't change from last frame.

    Many 3D games make use of RenderTextures for rendering dynamic content on ingame Monitors (survalience cameras, computer screens, TV's, bilboards, mirrors, etc).

  7. #17
    In my opinion the biggest problem with firemonkey is that it's bugged like hell.

    Chromium has it's own dll with flashplayer. Not sure how smooth interfacing menu to the game would go though ;) On other hand my game is all cubes and flat sprites so maybe I'll just keep it simple.
    thanks for the tips guys

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