Game programming - graphical interfaces
I have been programming for some time now and would like to start learning computer games. I know the standard language on the market is C ++, for 3D graphics the main choice is between Direct 3D and OpenGL, but what is the most widely used GUI framework? I'm on a Mac right now, so if the native Windows API is the answer, what is cross platform choice?
To be clear, I am not looking for favorites for people, but simply that the general or standard choice of the gaming industry for me to learn and get to know.
Thanks, Spencer
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I don't think there is any framework in particularly widespread use. Inside a game application, we tend to roll our own user interfaces or use the ones that come with the engine.
Games tend to have many custom art and animation that are difficult to implement with general-purpose widgets; and besides, most of the toolboxes don't play well with D3D or OpenGL, or have good ports for Xbox and PS3. As such, you will see many implementations of the interface, created by scratching, that have widgets, resulting in direct callbacks for textured polygons and font glyphs.
Outside of the game, in "glue" screens, that is, with the installer and other parts of the application other than D3D, we usually just use the native API for the operating system in question, ie Cocoa or (ugh) MFC.
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Scaleform is used in many AAA games. Unfortunately, it comes with a price tag to match! This basically allows you to design a user interface in Flash and then import it into your game (since designers are usually very familiar with Adobe tools, this makes them pretty easy). In the meantime, there is no need to worry about it. ”
For open source solutions, they are really enough. CEGUI is quite popular (although it usually suffers from "kitchen sink" syndrome - it has everything except the kitchen sink). I've also seen GLO and Awesomium (which is actually quite interesting).
Also, most game engines (like Unity, UDK, etc.) have their own built-in GUIs.
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I'm sorry, but he's not there. Every game requires a different kind of ui, and there are very few open source d3d / ogl ui frameworks to load (and those that are customizable enough are too slow).
Your best bet is to sit down and do a little thinking about your ui, draw all possible ui widgets on a piece of paper, try to see what you can eliminate (you really really want to keep it as simple as possible), then start from scratch and implement what you really do need from ui.
When I did that, I tried to make it easily extensible, with resizable dialog boxes and Swing-like containers that align controls for you, really cool in theory, but that made the implementation of this nightmare take months to figure out right, stick to the basics and everything should be fine!
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http://librocket.com/ is a really good UI toolkit. it uses html / css layout verbage to describe your windows and styles and allows rendering on whatever system you choose.
We chose it over the scaled format because of the flexibility it gave us to accommodate the motives of the ui client.
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