On Wednesday, 1 July 2015 at 19:16:28 UTC, Vladde Nordholm wrote:
So today I released version 1.1.0 of my console rendering
library clayers!
What this new update offers is support for colors, where you
can set the text- and background-color! This is thanks to the
library 'colorize' (d-colorize on GH).
In case you don't know what clayers is (which you most likely
don't), it's a console rendering library aimed at console
games. It currently supports layer handling and colors.
clayers on GitHub: https://github.com/vladdeSV/clayers
clayers on dub: http://code.dlang.org/packages/clayers
I saw this when you first announced it and have been meaning to
write you about it. In some ways, it reminds me of a greenfield
implementation of what I was getting into with the ncurses
backend of my engine.
When I come back to that (Some day! Soon! Maybe!), I was
thinking of pulling in Adam's terminal.d; this might make a good
companion to that? I certainly wouldn't lose any sleep at night
to replace ncurses entirely and I look forward to seeing what you
come up with.
Thoughts/ideas/suggestions:
* I think everyone working on this problem ends up making
coordinate types. ~_~;; I definitely recommend defining XCoord
and YCoord as separate types so a common inversion bug is
prevented-- that's saved me a number of times. In my experience,
a straight alias was vexingly insufficient so I use a struct
(though it's still not where I want it).
* Make a no-args init that detects terminal dimensions. It's
just nicer that way.
* I like the two-corner constructor for ConsoleLayer. I can't
remember why I didn't go that route myself. It may have been
that I was just trying to "make it work" instead of "make it
nice", but there could be something more. I forget.
* Relative (percentage-based) dimensions seem like they could be
really handy, but I've never figured out how to make them feel
good. Maybe you can do better.
* Simplify bordered windows. I feel pretty strongly that that
should be abstracted into the ConsoleLayer, honestly. If not as
part of the constructor, then as a property you can set. Default
to nothing and allow setting it to a character ("#") or to a
manifest constant that tells it to use unicode box drawing
characters. (Or maybe the property is an enum BORDER {NONE,
UNICODE, CHAR}, and the character is separate? I don't know.)
* A method to get the current layer order is probably worth
considering. And a way to get the priority index for a layer.
And even relative reordering; e.g. layerA.moveAbove(layerB);
* There's no way to move or resize a layer? Is the the idea to
just destroy and recreate the layer with the new origin/size?
* Make writing to the window automatically go inside the border.
This is actually why my BoxWin class wraps two ncurses panels:
one is a border pane and the other is a text pane so I get
trivial line wrapping (I have a small familiy of functions for
print modeled after the write() family in stdio).
-Wyatt
