Child window dividers

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14 comments, last by jwezorek 11 years, 1 month ago
I'm making a building editor for my game.

How do I make the child windows and divider? I'm going to use OpenGL in only one of them.
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MDI windows used to be the "big thing" a few years ago for this sort of thing but they're pretty much obsolete today. Usually you'd separate each viewport into its own window layer (or "panel" or "client area" or "frame" or whatever it's called in your case) and render there, and if you wanted to be able to resize viewports there is a "splitter" (or something) component that you can use which will allow the user to resize with the mouse. Even more work is needed if you want to make it modular (to move the viewports around, add and remove them, and even detach them as separate windows).

Or some frameworks have docking features which make this GUI stuff easier. What language/framework are you using to design the interface? It will be easier to answer you if you target your platform, this is too broad a question at the moment.

“If I understand the standard right it is legal and safe to do this but the resulting value could be anything.”

Visual C++ 2010 Express
Which GUI API/Framework are you using?
If you're writing to Win32 without using a framework, I think that there is no pre-made splitter control to use. You can google for 3rd party ones e.g.

http://www.relisoft.com/win32/splitter.html

but the splitter control itself is not the problem i.e. you can roll-your-own child window that paints a splitter bar on the screen pretty easily. The hard part is implementing the splitter semantics. This could be some work depending on how complex you want it to be, but basically it comes down to having multiple views or whatever in separate child windows that can be re-sized by dragging the splitter.

[win32] I'm finishing up working on a system for a project I'm working on (an engine editor). It's a system for docking windows which is cloned... I mean inspired... inspired by Visual Studio. See video and more info here: http://code-section.com/entry/21/win32-docking-system


[win32] I'm finishing up working on a system for a project I'm working on (an engine editor). It's a system for docking windows which is cloned... I mean inspired... inspired by Visual Studio. See video and more info here: http://my.opera.com/adelamro/blog/win32-docking-system
I'm not sure if there is considerable commercial value in it (I'd appreciate input on that), but I think at least one form of it I will make available for free use.


That's pretty nice looking ... Did you do the arrow controls -- the button thingies that determine if and where the child window is going to get docked -- as separate child windows or in some other way?
It's a single top-level popup custom control (window) with no borders, and has a GDI clipping region and transparency. The clipping region is recalculated when needed to shift the location of the central docking diamond as it's called. This control is the second major actor in this system after the dock host control.

It's a single top-level popup custom control (window) with no borders, and has a GDI clipping region and transparency. The clipping region is recalculated when needed to shift the location of the central docking diamond as it's called. This control is the second major actor in this system after the dock host control.


So the whole docking diamond is one non-rectangular window? When you say it has GDI clipping region do you mean you are setting its window region with SetWindowRgn or are you using newer APIs that I'm not familar with? i.e. "LayeredWindow" or whatever. (Basically my knowledge of Win32 GUI programming cuts off at about 1999)
How do I do it by hand?

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