GUI present in Allegro 5?

GUI present in Allegro 5?

Martin Kalbfuß

Member #9,131

October 2007

Hi,

Sorry if this was asked before. But i can't find anything in the documentation or forum. Maybe I don't know how to search. :-/

Martin

http://remote-lisp.spdns.de -- my server side lisp interpreter
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Evert

Member #794

November 2000

Not at the moment anyway. I'm not sure if we'll ship with a GUI addon, at least at first. Doesn't mean we can't add one (or more likely, someone else can provide one).
I have a partial port of A4's GUI (or at least the GUI manager, not the widgets) to the new API, but it's rather incomplete at the moment.

Just to be pedantic: Allegro 5 is not out yet. The current series of WIP releases is not Allegro 5 - it's slowly becoming Allegro 5, but it's not there yet. I just want to stress this point because I want to avoid the situation where people confuse the current WIP with a finished product and judge it by those standards.

Martin Kalbfuß

Member #9,131

October 2007

Thank you for your reply.

I know that Allegro 5 isn't finished yet. All I want to know was, if there will be a gui present when it's finished.
I ask because it was one of the reasons I prefered allegro over sdl. I like the allegro gui because it's simple and easy expandable. I would miss it.

Is A4's GUI like the current GUI or is it a different implementation?

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Don Freeman

Member #5,110

October 2004

Quote:

Is A4's GUI like the current GUI or is it a different implementation?

Depending on the version of Allegro you are using, I would suspect you ARE using version 4.x.x Yes, it is the same...
I think we should use Milan Mimica's Ma5king GUI library under development for the "Monday" project which is developed on top of MASkinG v0.80 by Miran Amon. Requires Allegro5 with iio (zlib, png), kcm_audio, font, ttf (TrueType) and acodec vorbisfile, vorbis, ogg) addons.

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Trent Gamblin

Member #261

April 2000

I think the people working on the Monday project are porting Masking to 4.9. Might want to check that out too. I have a GUI on my home page but it's mainly there for people who want to compile my games. It has no widgets or anything, it's just a skeleton that handles the events and whatnot, and I add custom widgets when my games need them.

Don Freeman

Member #5,110

October 2004

I think you posted at the same time as me

SiegeLord

Member #7,827

October 2006

Masking is C++. It is not suitable for a C library that is A5.

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Trent Gamblin

Member #261

April 2000

I didn't mean they were adding to the same tree, just making it work with 4.9 as a backend.

Martin Kalbfuß

Member #9,131

October 2007

That are good news for me. So when it will be the same gui, i can post feature requests. Yeah.

I thougt A4 is the name of a developer. It was late yesterday.

There's a second point I preferred Allegro over SDL. It's DOS support. Planned?

Will there be other stable releases before 5?

http://remote-lisp.spdns.de -- my server side lisp interpreter
http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/ -- Modula-2 alias Pascal++

Evert

Member #794

November 2000

Quote:

It's DOS support. Planned?

For Allegro 5? No. Someone would need to port it to DOS (and be willing to maintain that port).

Quote:

Will there be other stable releases before 5?

Possibly. A 4.4 (or even a bugfix 4.2) would be neat.

axilmar

Member #1,204

April 2001

If there is a GUI add on for Allegro 5, will it be game-oriented or tool-oriented? or both?

ALGUI: c++11 A5 GUI library.

Peter Wang

Member #23

April 2000

Most likely there won't be any such addon. If there is, it will be for the same reason there was a GUI in Allegro 4: to support tools and test programs.

Martin Kalbfuß

Member #9,131

October 2007

The gui is good for game creation, too. I don't see why it should be used for tools only.
It supports joystick handling. Isn't this for gaming?

The game I'm currently working on is using it. The only problem is the missing joystick support of the menus.

http://foto.arcor-online.net/palb/alben/95/1736995/400_3430333964633536.jpg
http://foto.arcor-online.net/palb/alben/95/1736995/400_6433393433633761.jpg
http://foto.arcor-online.net/palb/alben/95/1736995/400_6131386330316134.jpg
http://foto.arcor-online.net/palb/alben/95/1736995/400_6338333965663035.jpg

http://remote-lisp.spdns.de -- my server side lisp interpreter
http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/ -- Modula-2 alias Pascal++

Peter Wang

Member #23

April 2000

sigh Here we go. What is so bad about using a third party GUI system? Why does it have to be part of "Allegro"? We could never write a system that satisfies everybody's needs, and if we did it would probably be so complex that nobody was satisfied.

Martin Kalbfuß

Member #9,131

October 2007

Reasons to keep the allegro gui:

It's allready there
It's C. there are few guis for C. Mostly C++
CEGUI is based on it.
for porting games from allegro 4.x
to reduce dependencies.

I understand you want to clean up the allegro code. That's right. But if you do to much you will end up having sdl. And there is allready one.

http://remote-lisp.spdns.de -- my server side lisp interpreter
http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/ -- Modula-2 alias Pascal++

Edgar Reynaldo

Major Reynaldo

May 2007

Quote:

What is so bad about using a third party GUI system?

'Surface' interaction makes that fairly difficult. How do I tell the third party GUI to write to a BITMAP, and conversely, how do I tell Allegro to draw to the surface the 3rd party GUI is using?

If you meant a 3rd party GUI built using Allegro, please ignore me.

The point is that if no GUI is provided then many of the users are going to end up implementing their own partial gui's and essentially taking way more time than should be necessary to program rather than having a good core gui that can be customized to suit each user's needs.

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Martin Kalbfuß

Member #9,131

October 2007

Exactly. The gui should not be gtk+ or something. Only the core components, like the current one.

http://remote-lisp.spdns.de -- my server side lisp interpreter
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Thomas Harte

Member #33

April 2000

I am so keen for Allegro 5 not to include a GUI* that I will personally volunteer to write a brand new one as an addon if necessary.

Furthermore, with the way that Allegro 5's built-in event system seems to be heading, I don't think adapting the Allegro 4 code is necessarily the correct way forward. It seems like it'd just be duplicating functionality.

Edgar > good work on the avatar. Now you're talking my childhood. I might pull out some spoons and start doing a phoney Scottish accent.

I should be clear: I'm not a developer, just an extremely seasoned user.

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Kitty Cat

Member #2,815

October 2002

Quote:

What is so bad about using a third party GUI system?

They're large, bloated, and clunky. And they don't tend to have a license like Allegro. It makes distributing your Allegro app easier if the corresponding GUI tools don't need extra dependancies.

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Peter Wang

Member #23

April 2000

And if you take the Allegro 4 GUI, adapt it for Allegro 5, but don't bundle it with Allegro 5?

Thomas Harte

Member #33

April 2000

So something deliberately limited with the same license as Allegro that was as unintrusive as possible would be good enough?

I agree that it's realtively easy to go overboard. I would say that a GUI system that filled the Allegro 4 GUI void should be less sophisticated than the original Macintosh QuickDraw, which I think sat in a 128 kb ROM.

[My site] [Tetrominoes]

Evert

Member #794

November 2000

Quote:

The gui is good for game creation, too. I don't see why it should be used for tools only.

Nothing's stopping you.

Quote:

It's allready there

Not for A5 it's not.
The drawing code needs to be completely changed, and the way input and updates are handled have to be changed quite a bit as well. This is a good thing, because the change is actually an improvement in many ways.

Anyway, let's be clear on this: any GUI is not going to make it into Allegro 5's "core". There's no reason it would have to be. It'll be an addon, quite possibly one you need to download and install separately.

Quote:

The way I'm doing it now seems ok (well, it's a bit hackish, admittedly): GUI objects are activated by events and generate custom events as well. The "player" is responsible for passing these events around.

Either way it doesn't matter: anyone can do what he likes in this sense; Allegro 5 won't care, considering it doesn't have GUI "of its own".

EDIT

Quote:

And if you take the Allegro 4 GUI, adapt it for Allegro 5, but don't bundle it with Allegro 5?

Yup, that should make everyone happy.
We should probably do the same thing for an Allegro 4 compatibility layer: make it an optional addon.

Martin Kalbfuß

Member #9,131

October 2007

As long as there is a package system, helps to integrate the gui easily, this wouldn't be a problem.
But I don't understand why you want to exlude it. Every real game needs a a few gui elements at minimum.
So not having a GUI as part of the game lib, is like having no sound support.

Allegro is a game lib, not a multimedia lib.

http://remote-lisp.spdns.de -- my server side lisp interpreter
http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/ -- Modula-2 alias Pascal++

Matt Smith

Member #783

November 2000

I have been one of the greatest fans of the Allegro 4 GUI, but I also agree that it should not be in the Allegro 5 core.

We don't have one that works as well as QuickDraw/GEM/Win3.1 (the three classic 16 bit ones) ready to throw in as a replacement either.

An addon is ideal, as you can choose the one that suits you best. We will have at least an Allegro 4 gui clone and MASkinG to choose from before 5.0 is ready

Elias

Member #358

May 2000

Quote:

We don't have one that works as well as QuickDraw/GEM/Win3.1 (the three classic 16 bit ones) ready to throw in as a replacement either.

And it wouldn't be easy - even GTK or Qt don't do a whole lot more than those, as far as I can see. But they are much larger projects than all of Allegro.

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