Since in games you use OpenGL or DirectX or SDL or something similar, and you want it to run fullscreen and want the Gui to look smooth with the rest of the game, you can't use the standard Windows GUI. Do professional games have their code for the whole GUI? Like scrollbars and checkboxes and stuff, and windows that can be dragged. I made a GUI for my own game that supports almost anything I want except windows that can be dragged, and it looks like this at the moment: Both the font and the buttons are OpenGL textures. I had to make everything manually, checking if the mouse is on top of a button or checkbox or not, calculating the size of a button so the text can fit in it, moving around the cursor in the Input Line, allowing unicode style input, handling backspace, delete button and arrow keys for the Input Line, making a String Stack for the console, checking the length of words between spaces in a string for splitting text between words to make the lines fit inside the box, making panels that can have any size with tileble center, corner and side textures, etc... I'm wondering, was the creation of this GUI useful or not? Do you create your own GUI for your game this way?

Looks quite nice! Sadly, yes, it is necessary (in opengl, however, direct x has just started providing a GUI library for exactly that purpose, but i dont know how well it will catch on because, well at least for people like me, while i dont like reinventing the wheel, i still want to write some of my own code :-D ),still, i think many people do exactly what you have done

(id actually be curious to see how you did the font) :-D

anywho, hope that helps
-Dan

Quote:Original post by Ademan555
(id actually be curious to see how you did the font) :-D

I'm glad you asked :D

First of all, to allow the program to print error messages if it doesn't find any image, I have embedded the font texture into the exe file instead of loading it from an image.

To print text or numbers, I made a function that can draw a single character, and then a function that goes through every character of a string, drawing each character behind the previous one.

styles like italic and bold are done by playing with texture coordinates in OpenGL, and colors are easy of course.

Then there are more advanced printing functions, that can go to the next line and split text between words and stuff.

And there's also support for other fonts loaded from bitmap images, by using a pointer to a font, which is an array of 256 character texture objects (one for each ascii value).

Most "pro" GUIS seem to be based on bitmap images for things like labels, buttons, highlights and glow. Artists have more control in Photoshop than you have in your GL code.

Also, for text output, I've found that you get best results with offscreen bitmaps where you draw TrueType fonts, and upload as a texture, for each text element. Using the single-font texture eats up too many vertices, and typically doesn't give you a good selection of font kinds, nor typographical controls like kerning and ligatures.

You should take a look at the Quake 3 game source.
The GUI is included and the scripting part sounds like a good idea for extensions and such.
Anybody want to comment that?
Because right now I'm designing my own, and I've decided it to be scripted like Quake 3...

GUIS are a proverbial pain in the ass. Doing it from start is a lot of work. Not complicated work, just hard work. That and all the different layouts, funky effects, multiple viewports and widescreen (I'm mostly talking console)... If you can use someone else's work, the better. Especially if you plan on doing extra dialogs like lists, combo boxes, trees, scrollbars, ... gives me the shivers.