imGui bindings

hgy29 · August 2018

Dragon bones seems really good! Wouldn't that be problematic (license/legal stuff) to integrate spine runtime in gideros ? Wouldn't it be better to use dragon bone runtime ?

hgy29 · August 2018

Otherwise maybe you people can try to convince Spine guys to give me a license so that they could add gideros to their list of supported engines ?

keszegh · August 2018

hgy29 said:
Otherwise maybe you people can try to convince Spine guys to give me a license so that they could add gideros to their list of supported engines ?

this is a very good idea, they could only win with this, but probably the 'core developers' should write/send such a formal request.

Apollo14 · August 2018

hgy29 said:
Otherwise maybe you people can try to convince Spine guys to give me a license so that they could add gideros to their list of supported engines ?

uh, I forgot that I've asked Spine guys 2 weeks ago

http://ru.esotericsoftware.com/forum/Will-you-add-Gideros-SDK-support-question-to-DevTeam-10568?p=47563#p47563
Their devteam answered:

Looks like Gideros supports textured meshes out of the box, so it shouldn't be to hard to write an integration. Could you file an issue on the tracker at https://github.com/esotericsoftware/spine-runtimes/issues? We can't commit to a timeline for this though, there are other runtimes that need making first Cheers!

I agree with @keszegh , most likely they will reply to our Core devs and include Gideros in their list, probably provide license, they won't lose anything and it's totally in their interests also

oleg · August 2018

The best game created in the spine is Rayman Legends for pc-Win

To understand the full potential of the spine, you have to play this game

keszegh · August 2018

guys, i'm glad this topic became this lively and perhaps will have some outcome too.
on the other hand i get two emails after EVERY post:
-...commented on...
and
-...answered your question.

is it possible to turn off the second one?

keszegh · August 2018

@oleg, i thought ubisoft has an in-house tool similar to spine but not spine.

oleg · August 2018

keszegh said:
@oleg, i thought ubisoft has an in-house tool similar to spine but not spine.

very similar to the old version of the spine

hgy29 · August 2018

I sent a message to Esoteric software, let see what they say...

hgy29 · August 2018

Great news, Esoteric software is very keen on being able to advertise Gideros compatibility. They sent me a license code for Spine so here we go, I am gonna work on Spine support for Gideros!

Apollo14 · August 2018

cool!!!
Their devteam is very open-minded, they perform hell lot of work improving Spine. Even after they've become 'big guys' they didn't get spoiled

Spine truly deserves its popularity.

SinisterSoft · August 2018

@hgy29 - if you contact them then I'm sure they would give you a licence if you say you will make the plugin for Gideros.

Edit: oops - just noticed that you did this!

keszegh · August 2018

thanks @hgy29 for the spine plugin, the rest of us should not forget to donate some when downloading gideros to express our appreciation.
if dragonbones truly can save to spine format then we will be able to use both in our projects, cool.

finally, we can get back to the original question of which gui to put into gideros and how.

oleg · August 2018

keszegh said:

if dragonbones truly can save to spine format then we will be able to use both in our projects, cool.

dragonbones exports to spine 2.1 or spine
3.3

totebo · August 2018

hgy29 said:
Great news, Esoteric software is very keen on being able to advertise Gideros compatibility. They sent me a license code for Spine so here we go, I am gonna work on Spine support for Gideros!

AWESOME! Fantastic work @hgy29. One of the (few) things missing from the Gideros arsenal.

totebo · August 2018

Back to the original ImGui question. Based on the screenshots (link below) it looks like a large number of UI components with a set graphic style:

https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/1273

Whilst this is cool, I feel it may be a better framework for apps, rather than games. Unless there is a way to "skin" the interfaces, in which case it would be very interesting.

One of the unicorn features of any game making tool is to have an IDE where artists can lay out their graphics and animations separately from the code. I'm a big fan of separating art and code, but I haven't been able to find a tool that specialises in this. The closest I've been to this was in the Flash days, where artists were able to play around with the timeline and coders seamlessly used the assets.

What do you guys think? When adding new features it's good to have concrete use cases. I would use a tool like this (if it existed!) to create UI and HUD, something that (to me at least) is very time consuming at the moment.

keszegh · August 2018

yes, imGui seems to be ok for non-game apps but when personal look is important, it may not be customizable enough. is wxwidgets or any other common gui better?

also i'm not familiar with editors, some sdks have their own like godot but sdk-independent specially gui-maker editors i'm not aware. maybe other people know more?

keszegh · August 2018

whenever the exported file is json etc then it is a possible option.
what about https://starlingbuilder.github.io/
or http://www.ogmoeditor.com/
?

Apollo14 · August 2018

@totebo you mean something like 'Cocos Creator' or 'Corona Level Editor'?

If I created UI from scratch in Gideros, definitely I would go mad. I use Photoshop, manage everything there, and after that it's easy to monkey-code (and yep, it's time-consuming).

Photoshop GUI Exporter could be very convenient (like this one that was made for Defold: https://github.com/AxelHammarback/Defold-Photoshop-GUI-Exporter )

I'm not sure if Photoshop exporter could suit your needs, probably you need something totally different.

antix · August 2018

You can achieve some interesting stuff with Tiled actually, using objects. Of course it is also time consuming. Something like Visual Studio would be optimal

antix · August 2018

Having something like wxWidgets would be great. Most often when making games you need editors and rolling your own inside Gideros is a real pain in the rear end. If there was something like wxWidgets where you could make windows forms for editing stuff that would be awesome.

gbison · August 2018

Hello all,

I just joined the community yesterday, I made a post in the intro forum for which many of you replied and I appreciate that. If you want to know more about me, please jump over to that introduction post. I am definitely glad to be here, I am certainly interested in helping the community as much as I can if I can at all - especially in the UI/UX area.

So, I'd like to give my thoughts, if I may (not that they count for much). Hopefully, in the coming months, I can make some sense of the way Gideros works both internally and externally. @hyg29 , I can't help with C++ at least to any benefit of engineering, but I may be able to develop other options for Gideros if there is some library support method. I assume others have tried building a GUI system in LUA itself (Widget Candy, Layout I believe)? If I were to bring in SDK's into C# and create libraries from them, can I build a wrapper to talk to the DLLs in LUA or would you simply have to implement them through C++ backend (trying not to put more load on you)? Again, forgive my ignorance, I may be talking completely off track here since I'm yet to invest any real time into Gideros - just trying to collect some thoughts as I re-write some Android apps in Gideros.

I had experience with Widget Candy many years ago, the library itself seemed like it had a huge amount of code to be a GUI library, but that may be due to trying to implement it in LUA. I have not yet tested "Layout", but have read that a few feel its somewhat difficult to implement.

For what its worth, my thoughts in regard to what I'm not seeing with Gideros or at least the biggest pain points along with my experience over the years in both a professional and indie capacity:

1) No GUI implementation (obviously)
This is critical in opening up Gideros to a wider range of people. Not all folks are programming zionist and creating GUI libraries can be a mundane task that creators really don't want any part of. They want to make their game or app and already struggle with the concepts of programming or even using LUA as simple as it is. All solid app and game development APIs should have GUI constructs these days - the mobile market itself nearly demands it in my opinion.

2) No GUI editor
This also goes again back to creators wanting to create as quickly as possible. You want to allow new developers to flourish within a product with visual progress, not immediately frustrate them with the inability to visually see whats happening, as well as continual implement, build, test, change, test and overall fiddling scenarios with GUI elements just to get a button in the right place or drop down not to overlap another element when expanded. This does not have to be some big concept, a simple placement editor (sigh...nothing is ever simple). That said, if one could understand the structure with regard to a sprite or bitmap, create a WinForm, WPF or JavaFX implementation that would allow folks to move images around on a canvas, then save those images to a file in JSON, XML or plain text if nothing else, that Gideros should be able to pickup and read at run-time, essentially re-creating the design inside representative of what you design in the editor. Consequently, this could potentially be built in LUA itself along with a GUI library - I'll investigate if there is no objection.

3) Animation or Tweening
I do not see any built-in support in the API for these. Hence, I assume the thread was hi-jacked with Spline because of an animation problem? I believe I did see however an external creation for the tweening, is this what eveyone is using?

4) No Networking
Im looking into how this can be done using Photon. It would appear there is a LUA binding for Corona.

Again, my apologies for the length of this post. Im simply trying to be helpful where I can and stay out of the way where Im not :-P .

Thanks!

keszegh · August 2018

for 'simple' tweening (that is, no bones etc.) there is indeed
http://giderosmobile.com/tools/gtween
but meanwhile
http://docs.giderosmobile.com/reference/gideros/MovieClip#MovieClip
became pretty advanced too and you can do basically the same with it.

totebo · August 2018

Great post @gbison.

1,2) Would love to have this in Gideros.

3) Gtween or MovieClip work well. Unlike to be able to step everything (so I can pause the game easily and so I'm not relying on a timer, which can end up out of sync) so I built a lightweight tween library in Lua, which essentially works like Gtween, with the difference that I can step each frame.

4) I've released a realtime multiplayer game in Gideros using a custom backend communicating via Lua Socket and Websocket. In terms of off the shelf support, there is Noobhub which works well, but is client only. I'd love to be able to use Photon without having to mess about with server code. In fact, I would consider paying for it, and may not be alone!

Apollo14 · August 2018

TNT Animator Studio is a good GUI editor for managing animations:
http://www.tntparticlesengine.com/?wpdmact=process&did=Ni5ob3RsaW5r
(you have to exclude obsolete classes 'tntanimator32.lua'&'tntanimator64.lua'
instead of them include attached here 'tntanimator.lua' to the project)

Basic GTween info:
http://appcodingeasy.com/Gideros-Mobile/Gideros-GTween-with-easing

The most basic example:
1) include 'gtween.lua' and 'easing.lua' to the project
2) in your 'main.lua':

local pix1=Pixel.new(0xc0392b,1,50,50)
pix1:setX(200)
stage:addChild(pix1)
 
GTween.new(pix1, 1.5, {y = 300}, {ease = easing.outBounce})

I'd love to be able to use Photon without having to mess about with server code. In fact, I would consider paying for it, and may not be alone!

definitely you're not alone

p. s. almost all of the top-tier multiplayer games (like War Robots, etc.) use Photon

Apollo14 · August 2018

gbison said:
I assume the thread was hi-jacked with Spline because of an animation problem?

Currently Lua Spine lib is fixed (many thanks to hgy29!), more perfomant C++ plugin is on the way. So I'd say currently we have no problems with animation.

rrraptor · July 2020

Idk how spine hijacked this thread, but 2 years later... maybe we can come back to it?

Im still trying to make my own GUI, but it takes a lot of time to create and debug new widgets because Im using "retained" mode approach. ImGui uses "Immediate" approach which makes it cleaner and less buggy. You can watch a very short video that explains whats the difference between them:

Also, there are tons of widgets in ImGui and so I think it is worth trying to create a binding for it. I can even try to do this (as a plugin, probably?) but I have no idea where to start.

P.S.There haven't been many changes since the last update to my library, but this is what the latest version looks like for now:

antix · July 2020

@rrraptor That's a great idea but personally I don't think it's worthwhile. I say that because I don't see Gideros ever being able to make apps that need a user interfaces as complex as that since Gideros is really a gaming platform, not a utility platform.

Also.. your little GUI framework is very good and more than Gideros needs I'd say

keszegh · July 2020

@antix, check out my app Fragmenter, the gui could be improved, i know, ergonomically and visually too. but in any case my point is that it's an app that does need a complex interface and is kept developed in gideros.

talis · August 2020

I agree that Gideros is a game engine. But it doesn't mean that it should not have detailed and up to date Gui library. This is always a plus. It can be used to make not only busienss apps also in games too. There are so many examples of complex GUI games in the market.
My point is this is a great contribution from @rrraptor and showing the power of opensource soul

Please keep us updated if any more development done @rrraptor .

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