I'll post updates of my gui library in this thread.

Project page: https://github.com/axilmar/algui

I have added a skinning API, as well as a test skin example.

Comments/suggestions are welcomed.

Comments about the build system:

• Handmade Makefiles were never okay, especially those that hard-code the source files in them

• Makefile wants Allegro 5.1, there's no good reason for Allegro 5.1 to be necessary for this library

• stricmp wasn't found on my Ubuntu

Comments about the GUI:

• Why a separate event hierarchy? The whole point of having an Allegro GUI is that it doesn't add layers of interface bloat, in my opinion

• This is especially evident with the timer thing... why can't you use your game timer for the GUI as well; why does the GUI need a timer of its own?

Comments about the example:

• Get a real game loop, please

• It doesn't draw anything except the messages for me

The skin returned is not NULL, and I checked that all the bitmaps load fine too. It turns out I have to minimize and maximize the window to see the widgets.

How do you get the GUI to draw? As in, what function would I call to cause a full redraw of the whole GUI?

Perhaps there is no initial expose event under X-Windows. I added a call to draw the gui for the first time.

It's the function algui_draw_widget(widget).

I was using it on skin filenames, and I didn't consider it necessary to handle unicode. I will change it in the future if there is request for it.

Yes. The function algui_dispatch_event(widget, allegro_event) is used to dispatch the Allegro event to widgets.

I am not using the Allegro event queue for the gui though; it's not necessary. The above function dispatches the events to widgets as needed.

No, I don't do that. Events are delivered straight to widgets via messages. They cannot be intercepted at the event loop. There is no need to do that.

I don't see any use case for that. Perhaps you have one?

This.
I process all input from a loop that listens to events. I would expect any GUI I use to fit into that design.
Whether you agree and follow that is your own business, but it is what I personally would expect and want.

That means that if I want to put "Niño" as a name of my window I'm not going to be able?

You library seems really good, but no supporting UTF-8 is an error... there is people around the world using Allegro, apart from the USA most of the from the EU.

The UTF-8 API of Allegro is nice but I think the harder part wasn't developed... Exist al_ustr_append to append a simple charter or a string of charter to the end of another string. But should also exist something like al_ustr_erase to erase the last charter from the string.

This because UTF-8 uses 1 to 4 bytes to save info... so depending of the letter you want to erase you are gonna have to delete 1,2,3 or 4 bytes... so you have to do comparisons and blablabla... Someone correct me if I'm wrong because that is what I'm doing.

Of course this might take you a while, so you can leave it to the end...

To erase the last character:

al_ustr_remove_chr(str, al_ustr_offset(str, -1));

There's not much the library has to do to support UTF-8. As long as the text drawing functions call the UTF-8 functions you basically get it for free.

I chose to store all strings as ALLEGRO_USTR, but that's not really a requirement.

My library does exactly that: it reads events from an Allegro event queue and then dispatches them to widgets. Widget messages are not placed in the queue though, they are executed directly from the dispatch function. But the event loop is still there.

Do you have any use case for widget messages (not events) to be placed in a queue?

Yes. The window name (actually, window id) is not for display purposes. It's for programming purposes only, i.e. skinning, debugging etc, and I think that sticking to English makes sense: it's the simplest solution that works. It only requires static C strings. Putting UTF-8 there will make it necessary to do memory management on those ids, which is unnecessary.

All the widgets will have UTF-8 text. Actually, they will have an ALLEGRO_USTR, just like Matthew's lib.

Well, that's misleading. Static strings can contain UTF-8 encoded text.

It's just there are some troubles with MSVC in East Asian locales, the gory details of which were elucidated earlier on this forum.

I want to try it.

What I need to install it on Windows?

GTK+ and what else?

I'm getting this:

$ make
gcc -shared -Wl,-soname,libalgui.so -o lib/libalgui.so.1 obj/algui_list.o obj/al
gui_rect.o obj/algui_tree.o obj/algui_widget.o `pkg-config --libs allegro-5.1 al
legro_font-5.1 allegro_image-5.1 allegro_primitives-5.1 allegro_ttf-5.1`
Package allegro-5.1 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `allegro-5.1.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'allegro-5.1' found
Package allegro_font-5.1 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `allegro_font-5.1.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'allegro_font-5.1' found
Package allegro_image-5.1 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `allegro_image-5.1.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'allegro_image-5.1' found
Package allegro_primitives-5.1 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `allegro_primitives-5.1.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'allegro_primitives-5.1' found
Package allegro_ttf-5.1 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `allegro_ttf-5.1.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'allegro_ttf-5.1' found
obj/algui_widget.o: In function `draw':
c:\axilmal/src/algui_widget.c:186: undefined reference to `al_set_clipping_recta
ngle'
obj/algui_widget.o: In function `destroy':
c:\axilmal/src/algui_widget.c:207: undefined reference to `al_free_with_context'

obj/algui_widget.o: In function `destroy_timer':
c:\axilmal/src/algui_widget.c:362: undefined reference to `al_destroy_timer'
c:\axilmal/src/algui_widget.c:364: undefined reference to `al_free_with_context'

obj/algui_widget.o: In function `algui_draw_widget_rect':
c:\axilmal/src/algui_widget.c:1611: undefined reference to `al_get_clipping_rect
angle'
c:\axilmal/src/algui_widget.c:1617: undefined reference to `al_set_clipping_rect
angle'
obj/algui_widget.o: In function `algui_create_widget_timer':
c:\axilmal/src/algui_widget.c:2063: undefined reference to `al_create_timer'
c:\axilmal/src/algui_widget.c:2065: undefined reference to `al_malloc_with_conte
xt'
c:\axilmal/src/algui_widget.c:2069: undefined reference to `al_get_timer_event_s
ource'
c:\axilmal/src/algui_widget.c:2069: undefined reference to `al_register_event_so
urce'
c:\axilmal/src/algui_widget.c:2070: undefined reference to `al_start_timer'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [lib/libalgui.so.1] Error 1

I'm using MSYS

hmm.. I supposed it.. but why are you using Allegro 5.1? 5.0 has just been released.

And I don't understand why when Allegro 5.0 wasn't ready, there was already a 5.1 version...

There is big advantages when using Allegro 5.1 instead of 5.0?