In your opinion, how well suited Allegro is for making 2D implementation of text-intensive UI? Lists, property tables, buttons for sorting, VCL-type stuff?
In your opinion, how well suited Allegro is for making 2D implementation of text-intensive UI? Lists, property tables, buttons for sorting, VCL-type stuff?
I don't know if I understand your question. Allegro is able to render texts. Note that it renders bitmap-based fonts only (ttf fonts are converted into bitmaps on loading).Originally Posted by Thyandyr
You can take a look to the MinGRo GUI system I designed (mngGUI, mngGuiCommonCtrls and mngGuiUtils; sorry for mixing English and Spanish in IMPLEMENTATION comments). Didn't implemented any list or table widget yet but textbox and textlist are planned and I think I'll not have any problem.
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As far as I know Allegro as a game development library does not have UI support already built in. So basically you need to develop your own UI library or use one of the existing ones that are compatible with Allegro.
If you want to see what is eventually possible then I suggest you check game named Factorio (https://www.factorio.com/), if you haven't played it already. Factorio is a 2D game developed on top of Allegro game library using C++ programming language. It has quite complex and detailed UI, with some advanced features like scaling, automatic scrolling when needed and more.
Now I don't know whether they are using some 3rd party UI library or they made one themselves. But since in the past I have done quite some communicating with Factorio developers I could probably get you more detailed info about the UI library they use if you are interested in such information.
Backing to topic.
I've just finished the new animation module. I took more time and effort than expected because initially I planned to add animations as part of the sprite engine as I did with the tile engine (any tile may be animated), but just when I started the implementation of the sprites part I saw it would be better to do not do so. As I've said the tile engine is different: the animation module is part of the tileset. After doing some testing with the tilemap example I think I took the correct decision.
But after that I see the current "definition file" I implemented hasn't a good design, so I'll remove the current procedures and implement a simple scripting system. The engine will not require to use it so a different scripting engine can be used instead.
Tello said I'm at 70% of the alpha version.
Last edited by Ñuño Martínez; 30-05-2017 at 05:45 PM.
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1.alpha release
Last month I didn't work as much as I would like on MinGRo. Anyway I've added a complete command-line simulation so it is now quite simple to add an in-game console, even use the command interpreter to define a batch-like scripting language. It isn't fast and lacks any memory management though.
Also, I've done some internal improvements, bug fixing and documentation updates.
Next LudumDare is near so I decided to make a first alpha release so I can use it in the contest. You can test it too.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingro/files/1.alpha/
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So I'm back, and I decided to go straight on to finish this engine, or at least a "beta" version.
The first I've done is to rewrite the animation manager and the sprite engine subsystem. In both cases I used classes for everything so each time the number of animations or sprites changed the engine has to destroy and/or create a lot of tiny objects. So I've replaced some classes by records (as discussed here): Less memory fragmentation and less spreading.
Also I've decided to use more ideas from Diana Gruber's "Action Arcade Aventure Kit" book in the sprite engine. As a side effect the change has reduced the code complexity: I think the code (both the engine and the examples) are cleaner and more easy to read and follow. I don't know if it is faster now, but I like it.
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Looking forward to the beta
Me too.
Right now I'm thinking in "data containers". I have an idea of a "packed file" container format similar to Ken Silverman's GRP files but using IFF I think it will work. I'm not sure if a "data container" component that keeps all things in memory is actually needed though.
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