Irrlicht Engine

The static text element didn't really cut it for me so I made a new GUI component that supports text of different colors and fonts, images (inline and anchored), tabs, and horizontal lines(!).

Screens:


The scrollbar isn't part of the element, but another element I made which I called CGUIPanel. It simply adds a scrollbar to scroll through the elements inside it.

So how does it work? I invented a simple syntax that lets you add "control tags" in the text. So if I write:

This is an armor: #img:armor#. This #col:red#text is red#col#.

It will look like this:

This is an armor: . This text is red.

These are all the tags supported:

• #img:(name):(anchor)# : Displays an image. If anchor is specified (optional) it will be anchored to either left or right.
• #col:xxxx# ... #col# : Changes text color. #col# returns to original color.
• #font:xxxx# ... #font# : Changes font. #font# returns to original font.
• #tab# : Indents the text. Similar to pressing the TAB key.
• #hline# : Inserts a horizontal line. Uses the text color. Width can be specified by writing #hline:2# for a 2-pixel thick line.
• #align#: Changes text alignment. #align:center# is centered text and #align:right# is right-aligned text. #align# makes it left-aligned again.

So what you waiting for? Download it now.
NOTE: It uses the core::map<> class from the SVN version, so I included "irrMap.h" in the download (so you don't need SVN to use it). I hope that's OK with everyone.

Now that I see what can be done with this, I think I'll now take it one step further and make an HTML-like GUI component. I'm thinking I could make an entire GUI out of HTML-like code. That would be awesome! That would pretty much obsolete this component, but I thought I'd share what I found anyways.

If you like it, please tell me what you think
If you don't like it, please press Alt+F4.

wow, great idea, looks amazing too. nice work
*opens msn*

This is awesome!! I haven't yet looked at the code but the examples look sweet. Mine, if I add it to IrrSpintz? I'd have to change it to use STL Map and probably some other things...but I'd love to add it!!!

Spintz wrote:This is awesome!! I haven't yet looked at the code but the examples look sweet. Mine, if I add it to IrrSpintz? I'd have to change it to use STL Map and probably some other things...but I'd love to add it!!!

Sure you can add it. Though, I'm working on the HTML GUI component right now, so you might want to wait and see if something better comes up.

Heh, i did the same thing for my game (still in progress)...
As a suggestion for futher improvement: you can add tag that make text between certain tags dynamic (jumping chars for example) since you do paining for yourself anyway quite funny!

very very nice! I could use this...

Awesome work dude, i might need something like this for my game. Thanx a lot!

ooooh aaaah!

Looks really cool

Superb work! I hope this gets integrated.

Dammit Klasker, how are you so damn cool! Thanks a bunch.

It's been nearly two weeks now so I thought I'd give a heads up about the HTML renderer I mentioned. I made a working HTML renderer so far, with all the features of old version, and <table> tags and nested tags. BUT the code is not very good. In fact, the CHTMLContainer class has become a blob class full of spaghetti code, which is why I am not releasing anything at the moment. I want to release something decent instead, and next time it may not be based on true HTML but rather a similar XML-based language.

Bitplane mentioned having IGUIElements as HTML elements, and I want that possible too, but with the design I came up with it didn't seem to be very feasible. But that's probably because of the way IGUIElement works: It will only take the clipping plane from its parent, so I have to make IHTMLElement an IGUIElement too. Geez!

Technically it's working now, but if this is to be useful it needs to be better than that, so I'll be back when I have something better.

Wonderful, thanks for keeping us posted.

One thing to bear in mind is that it's perhaps easier (for hybrid and bitplane) to get new functionality integrated if you submit it in smaller patches and updates, rather than big blobs.

Looks professional. Keep it up.

Hmm sorry to hear about the HTML version giving u problems. Have you looked at using an external parser like TinyXML?

Looks really cool, can't wait for the next version. Keep us updated!