Looking really nice Jeremy, keep up the good work! Jason
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jeremy L. Moles Sent: Tuesday, June 19, 2007 10:48 A To: osg users Subject: [osg-users] Generating Interest :) Over the last week or so I've really been experimenting with learning various and necessary components of OSG (I posted about this last week) required to put together a HUD/UI toolkit uses 100% native OSG without any reproduction of math/2D/3D classes or glueware in an external library. This morning I created a video of it's very first "steps towards awesomeness" to hopefully generate a small bit of interest in my endeavor and perhaps get some opinions. Any expert advice or things to avoid from people who have done something similar in the past would be great. The current name idea is osgHUD; is this already taken? The video link is here (made in Linux using Yukon): http://cherustone.com/osgHUD.avi Some things demonstrated (please, forgive me if I used the wrong terminology; hopefully the ideas are understandable): - The window "borders" are drawn using Cairo (so that they're nice and round and antialiased). They can be scaled to any size without loss in clarity (but suffer from the fact when drawn, they don't perfectly blend to the most discerning eye because they're actually rendered on a full transparent surface and not on top of the actual OpenGL scene/color buffer). - The windows are post-processed by a GLSL fragment shader (just for fun!) that both creates the "progressive scanlines" and colors the windows darker or lighter depending on their Y position. - The windows are moved and rotated; resizing works, but I changed the architecture a bit last night, and trying to do resize ATM segfaults. :) I'll fix this up and maybe show another video next week with that working and other window decorations (minimize and close buttons, etc.) The general idea is this: in my opinion, web developers (or I should clarify and say Flash developers) have really been kicking the butts of game designers for a long time with regards to elegant, clean, and effective interface design. Part of this is because of the vector graphics backend of Flash (which osgHUD will harness by using Cairo) and part of this is because 2D graphics usually knows how to properly blend with the surface below them (something OpenGL can't do easily without a hit in performance). I feel like I can achieve the happen medium of crispness vs. performance; think "Flash quality UI's for OpenGL/OSG." At the very least it should give OSG developers some way to quickly throw together a few UI widgets and dialogs for prototyping, even if they end up using something custom in the end. I should mention that, in doing all this, my primary development constraints are: - Every UI "thing" (windows, buttons, etc.) should be 100% scalable, translate, and rotatable with any loss in clarity; what looks good at 1920x1200 should also look good at 800x600. - To accommodate custom widgets, the system will be developed in a general sense where the user defines a "layout" of rectangular regions which receive all the standard events a modern toolkit provides: mouseEnter, mouseOver, leftClicked, focused, etc. A small set of prebuilt interface elements will be provided (resizable windows, buttons, progress meter, etc.) but for the most part it will be assumed the user wants to create interface components that integrate naturally with their project. - As much as is reasonably possible will done using programmable functionality; fixed fallbacks might be considered, but it's very unlikely. I know this might turn off some users, but I don't think it's asking too much to require programmable functionality in 2007. Besides, if the idea is to "push the envelope but stay fast", I don't see a way of getting around it. :) _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/ _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/
