Next3D

[WILL]

I'm spending way too much time playing games

Famous last developer's post. (PS: 'The Force Unleashed Sith Edition' is super fun on the Mac!)

Hey your Next3D engine is starting to sound really neat. Since you are planning on releasing your engine, I'm assuming, for public usage, what do you think about doing a small article on how it's made up and how developers can use it in their games? The engine doesn't have to be done to do an article on it at this stage, just maybe a small description of what you're doing with some cool diagrams and figures illustrating the basic concept of the engine. I think this would do well to promote it's usage amoung other fellow developers. And would be a great article. Write me back at contact@pascalgamer.com if you are interested or just want to tell me to bugger off.

Either way this project looks great and I hope it get's to 1.0 eventually. UI is such a tricky aspect of game development.

[User137]

Opened a website for this project:
http://next3d.webs.com/

So far been unable to upload .zip there but at least i can share photos, news and have dedicated forums for questions/suggestions.

[djcityscapes]

This is interesting. Is this compatible with Delphi 2007?

[User137]

Works with Delphi 7, i have no other versions.

[User137]

Some news again about UI Editor and Next3D:
- Added new draw functions to Font class supporting wrapping and bounded text area.
- Added new draw functions to draw in "repeat" and "sections" mode. Sections are new and default way to draw UI components to retain sharp details. Pattern of a texture is divided in 9 custom sized parts where edges are not scaled when drawn, middle sections are. Button for example only has 1 texture shared for up and down state.
Screenshot: http://i35.tinypic.com/23vf2gy.png
- Saving and loading is finished with the dynamic format.
- List and DropDownList added. Supports text centering.
- Added Memo component. Supports wrapping and 2 ways scrolling.

I've been thinking how to manage multiple layouts and windows in 1 file. First i thought to make a separate layout list but now came up with idea of Visibility. User can simply add everything in the main panel and toggle the Visible state of its children with a CheckListBox.

[chronozphere]

Hey, that's a fine looking UI editor.

Are you using XML to store the UI layout or something else?

[User137]

No its own format. XML and similar has too much bloat such as <> tag characters, indentations etc. I just wanted to make it barely understandable when reading with Notepad in purpose of debugging or maybe even editing some value if needed.
http://pastebin.com/8F5HWtpR

[NecroDOME]

GUI editor looks nice and useful!!

How much work would it be to make it compatible with my "DataFile" format? url: http://www.necrosoft.nl/?p=790 It has nested elements, more like simplified readable XML. It only needs to place image, text, edit, panels and button elements with some small configurations like text and image.

just a question... I'm looking for a simple UI editor. And I don't want to make one myself .

Nice work!

[User137]

Well, yeah it can be little tricky saving object tree to another format. The current saving/loading is written in the container objects themselves, called recursively.

But your data format doesn't look complicated. How do you store normal and multiline strings?

[NecroDOME]

multiline strings would be saved either with escape characters or per-line. I also use it to define materials and models