I'm bored with the build system so it is time to have some fun:
Felix now has a builtin GUI. Well .. its work in progress!
Requirements:
* SDL2
* SDL_ttf
* SDL_image
must be installed. You will have to set up the Felix *.fpc database files
sdl2.fpc
sdl2_ttf.fpc
sdl2_image.fpc
Please see src/config/macosx for how to do this.
They should be setup for the Mac automatically.
Linux will be supported when someone using Linux commits the
appropriate changes. Please remember any *.fpc files in
$HOME/.felix/config
will be installed during the build process so if you rebuild Felix your
work is not lost.
SDL has many limitations. It is not designed as a GUI but as a way
to write portable games. So the GUI will be a bit basic. One major
deficiency is that there is no way to properly capture the mouse.
The SDL function that does this is bugged and they won't fix it.
More precisely it was designed for full screen operation to stop the
mouse going out of a particular pane. The implementation on OSX
is extremely bad, and the functionality is useless for a GUI where
you want to allow the mouse OUT of the window but remain owned
by the window.
Another problem is that to do advanced graphics you need OpenGL
which is very badly designed (non-reentrant) and has become a
nightmare of spaghetti options and changing API. Its hard to know
what works and what doesn't, and since shaders got introduced
the standard changed in an incompatible way .. my Mac only runs
version 1.2 I think it is of shaders, which is not compatible
with 1.3 due to a trivial syntax change.
Here is a working program:
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
include "gui/__init__";
open FlxGui;
FlxGui::init();
var w : window_t = create_window("My Window",50,50,400,400);
var font : font_t = get_font(OSX_dflt_font());
var lineskip = get_lineskip font;
var red = RBG(255,0,0);
var green = RBG (0,0,255);
clear_window(w,green);
write (w, 100,100,font,red,"HELLO");
write (w, 100,100+lineskip,font,red,"WORLD");
var clock = Faio::mk_alarm_clock();
Faio::sleep(clock,10.0);
destroy_window w;
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
The "hard bit" will be text input. I already have a text editor written
in Felix using SDL (run "make sdltest" or see demos/sdl), so I have
some working editing code that can be adapted.
Please note the interface will probably change!
I'm just hacking something simple together to start.
Two major features of Felix will be leveraged with this system.
The first is fthread/schannels. This will be used to handle SDL events.
We will also leverage it later to implement actors, that is, sprites that
move about the screen of their own accord.
The other feature we will need a bit later is embedding.
The reason we need this is that most GUI systems and also OpenGL
are utter crap. Stuff like threading, event polling, and drawing
the mix modestly OK on Linux with X don't work with other OS
GUIs and don't work with threads.
because games are real time systems, some threading is useful
to ensure, for example, you get a fixed video framerate
and response to keyboard or other control devices.
this is particularly important if you have a garbage collector :)
Most games around are crap, because they do not do this.
Don't blame the game writers. Blame the idiots that designed
the GUI systems and OpenGL.
In any case we may be forced to embed some code inside foreign
event loops.
In particular it would be nice if events could be monitored in a pthread
and dispatched like ordinary Felix async events. Unfortunately this
doesn't work on Windows because the event queue is "per thread".
It does work with X-Windows. I don't know about OSX.
Similarly it would be nice to do simultaneous drawing: sometimes
drawing has to be abandoned in favour of retaining a constant
frame rate. Unfortunately if you're using OpenGL to talk to a GPU
to do rendering, the only way to do this is to use a mutex to swap
contexts across threads.
--
john skaller
skal...@users.sourceforge.net
http://felix-lang.org
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