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UI Development Tools & Resources?

Started by Frag-Happy Apr 9, 2005 at 3:34 PM 2 replies 1k views

Original Post

Apr 9, 2005 at 3:34 PM

Hey guy and gals. My friends and I have a big game project coming up in a couple months and i've been asked to take care of the UI. I've done a couple of very basic 2-D UI's in the past, but nothing too exciting or impressive. For this project I was thinking of using XML for creating pages, and trying to incorporate some 3D models and animations. So I thought i'd see if anyone had any good resources or tools that they would suggest using. Also I know that Renderware uses their own UI development tool that is similar to Macromedia Flash called "Maestro". This made me wonder if it was possible to incorporate Flash or Actionscript straight into a C++ application. Any information is greatly appreciated! Thank you everyone. Sincerely, Frag-Happy P.S. In case you need to know, were using our own OpenGL based rendering engine for this project. Hope that helps.

HellRiZZer

Apr 11, 2005 at 12:55 AM

You can use my GUI from my website @ http://openglgui.sourceforge.net OR follow the tutorials on how to make a similar GUI.

Good luck.

__ODIN__

Apr 11, 2005 at 1:11 AM

You can take a look at GameSWF, by Thatcher Ulrich (http://www.tulrich.com/geekstuff/gameswf.html), a pretty cool, legally unencumbered, limited implementation of Flash. Has renderers for hardware acceleration in OpenGL and XBox. Runs like blazes, and great for those flashy little GUI movements your artist loves.

Another interesting one, approaching it from the opposite direction is Anark Game Studios. (http://www.anark.com/). They've got an SDK for integrating their 3D powerpoint replacement into your game engine.. Nice editing tools, but fairly heavy-weight (bascially means you need to implement a complete 3D engine for your UI). Also costs a fair chunk, so not for indie / freeware developers.

Having shipped a title with RW, I can tell you Maestro (was/is) a joke.. we ended up writing our own custom GUI system. Maestro's totally focused on console style micro-menus, so you're screwed if you're doing something like an RPG or a strategy game.

There's a few others (Crazy Eddie's GUI springs to mind, used by OGRE), but in general there's not a lot of solid, legally unencumbered, GUIs for game development. There's tons of flaky little widget-libraries, of course, but very few that have support you'd want for a quality game (Widget Editor, Animation, localization support, API independent, etc). Do let me know if you find anything :)

Allan

Frag-Happy

Author

Frag-Happy

Apr 11, 2005 at 1:29 PM

Thanhk you both for the replies, I have a good place to start looking now at least. A buddy of mine directed me to Crazy Eddie's, which so far I think is pretty impressive for a open public license. I got to actually talk to some of the Anark guys at GDC this past year when they were demoing their UI development tool. However after talking with a few othe UI developers, they mentioned some of the overhead it came with and that it was more of just a resource hog than any actual help. Can't really afford to buy it anyways though so I guess it doesn't matter. Anyways, thanks again guys!

Sincerely,
Frag-Happy

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