lazarus and opengl gui?

[phibermon]

Oh there's plenty of room for more GUIs. Mine is locked into it's design now and arguably has more overhead due to it's WM like functionality plus the additonal complexity whilst giving flexibility in a classic 'desktop' sence does force the user to use the GUI in a very specific way.

A GUI for a game would be designed very differently, it'd focus on skinning and would be more streamlined, not have the need for drag and drop handling or other such overheads.

Plus there are other design methodologies when it comes to GUIs, the classical desktop approach is clearly what I favour but again, there's a whole world of touch orientated interfaces that I've not 'touched' on.

I'm working in a tree like methodology where you have a program, it's window, it's widgets etc and it's all designed to work just like that. if you want just a button for example you have to add it within the context of a JUIElement (base class) essentially, it'd need it's own container window (the window manager itself is actually a full screen container so you can actually just add a button)

This means that even if you wanted just a single button, you'd have to do so within the context of the entire window manager (as you would with any classic OS gui)

And my Engine is OpenGL 3.x+ only, so I've not bothered to write renderers for the GUI for anything else.

A game GUI can have a much looser and flexible design, you don't need a message sub-system, you're not constrained by the rules of the system.

IE an awesome game GUI would have say, a compass mini-map and other specialized widgets, it'd have focus on overlay rendering for the game scene (so say stats or other such information rendered on top of the main display) not to mention compositing coolness like 3D effects on window/widget transitions.

Edit : Not to mention some form of game menu aspect to a GUI and other specializations like functionality for rendering conversation trees in an RPG game, widgets for player Inventory management etc

Thinking about it, let me stress that my UI, although it renders in OpenGL; is an application UI. it's clear that a game GUI can be and should be done in a totally different way

There's always room for new GUIs