Comments for No Limits Designs

Comment on Engine by Jay

Jay — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:45:16 +0000

Dude I was just looking your screenies, really love your water.. mine is okay, but it’s just too uniform. I’m using a sine wave to adjust my water in my terrain mesh which is obviously creating some issues at the coast lines, but it’s effective enough and I get great performance so far. In my new engine in DX10 (last you saw was DX9 non FFP) I haven’t yet completed my plane checking, so I’m drawing everything! It’s always encouraging

I just wish I was where I am now, 2 years ago, so we could at least be on the same page with most of this, hehe. I would really love to get some bump mapping and shadow mapping in place, any recommendations on approaches? Once again all the examples I see seem very anti-OO and over-bloated!

Comment on xWMA files by Jay

Jay — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:35:02 +0000

Yeah ;( It’s a shame really because I know all the Windows headers and DirectX class libraries are just as bad with the bloat; Meaning that unless you go the OpenGL/OpenAL route, you are always going to have that to contend with! I’ve just implemented a MD5 loader class and have animations working, and my terrain is now a generated mesh, meaning I should in theory be able to now do intersection tests. Ideally though I’ll have support for OpenGL too eventually, it’s just not always so easy to spot the analogous method calls and some of the basics are completely different! Luckily we have the hardware to fix some of this in place shame they couldn’t just agree on a standard Shader Language too lol

Comment on xWMA files by Scott

Scott — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 03:49:36 +0000

You’re welcome. The SDK example is pretty crappy. The above code does the same thing (except the above code also is able to load xwma files) and the SDK code example has like 5 times as much code. I just dont understand why people over-complicate things.

Comment on xWMA files by Jay

Jay — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:13:37 +0000

Thanks once again Scott for your help. It has been a while since we last spoke and I started again on my project since then; but I’ve made a lot of steps forward!
Anyway this code is invaluable, I just tried to make my own class for this from the SDK example and the using the CWavefile class in the SDKwavefile header file (without the DXUT header) and man, it was just buggy as hell!!

Comment on UI improvments by Scott

Scott — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 11:29:57 +0000

Thank you for that, I included an old Project file. I just uploaded the correct one.

try that out

Comment on UI improvments by Guest

Guest — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 09:45:51 +0000

Great.
One thing I forgot is that i may be that some files (e.g. sln) are missing or wrong path in the source package. I tried to build it with VS 2010, and I got such related errors. I hadn’t the time to fix them..

Comment on UI improvments by Scott

Scott — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 09:21:34 +0000

Thanks for the comment.

The text artifacts are contained in the skin file that I have to clean up by zooming in and removing them. I will get to that next.

The scrollbar issues are on my to-do list and I will add those features very soon and place a grey square over the bottom right corner so its seamless.

Sliders will be able to move by clicking on the rail soon too.

The window resizing is still screwy –I admit. I have some work to get it to behave correctly.

I will add an area to the color picker window for dragging –maybe a small tab– and make the window only movable from that tab, so picking colors doesnt accidentally move the window. Also, I will make it so you can click somewhere on the color and the circle will goto the mouse.

The blurriness of the text is another problem of the skin. I have to clean up the letters to make them sharp. Currently, there are pixels of the letters that have an alpha value which is like 50%, so a small text size will cause the text to appear blurry.

I will fix the window minimize text so that it cuts itself off before the buttons.

I will move the text cursor to the left a couple of pixels and see if that works better.

I greatly appreciate the comments and suggestions. I will work to integrate all of them by Wednesday.

Comment on UI improvments by Guest

Guest — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 08:19:50 +0000

Nice GUI library, great work!

I tried out the demo, it works fine on Win7 64-bit.

Some things i noticed, only minor bugs/issues…
* there are some text artefacts, see screenshot
* scrollbar is only useable with click&drag the knob, the clicking above/below a knob and the up/down buttons don’t work / or not good enough
* right bottom edge of two scrollbars shows shows “hidden” objects like buttons
* sliders are only usable with the knob
* using e.g. right bottom corner to resize a window to the smallest possible form and then trying to resize it to make the window bigger again (all with one mouse click and holding the mouse button) is not possible
* also resizing the window to make it smaller also move the window position
* color picker can move the window position
* changing the color involves clicking exactly on the color picker circle marker
* the text looks blurred and a bit stretched
* minimizing windows, the z-index of the window title is in front of the buttons to maximize, close the window
* textfield cursor is one space too far away to the right side

Screenshot:
http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/6159/guitextartefacts.png

Keep up the good work!

Comment on UI Library soon by Scott

Scott — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 13:33:49 +0000

The first release will be for Directx, but I plan on releasing an OpenGL / Linux version soon after as most of the UI code is platform agnostic. Unicode support is a possibility, however, the problem becomes what to do about drawing.
My current implementation works with UTF-8 character encoding and because I use that, I was able to optimize the text drawing. Consequently, the entire UI can be drawn in a single draw call regardless of the number of controls present. So, I can have 50 windows open with buttons, text, drop downs and many other controls in the window and the draw call will still be only one.
Another issue is with drawing the actual text. Currently, on directx Unicode text drawing is supported in directx 10, but was dropped in directx 11. The only way to draw text in directx 10 is to create a direct x 10 Device, create a texture, render the letters to a texture, then use that texture to draw the letters in directx 11. Also, the directx font renderer is SO INCREDIBLY SLOW that I will never include it in this UI. Having many text areas present on the screen can destroy your frame rate.
There are other issues related to text drawing of Unicode characters as well that makes it a headache. Without making this a complete post on what the UI will have, I wont support Unicode directly, I will however, support ANY language– which might seem strange (you will have to wait for a post on how that works later, but it is very simple I assure you).
Also, in regards to a text field that parses the text within it, I have not thought about that until now. I will think about that and come up with an answer later, however my main goal in this UI is: Speed; and Simplicity. So, if I can include any feature without violating that, then I will do it.

Thanks for the comment!

Comment on UI Library soon by Guest

Guest — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 09:40:43 +0000

Sounds interesting.

I am still searching for a lightweight GUI lib that has unicode text support and a few basic controls (label, textfield, buttons, …). A simple rich text field that parses RTF or very basic HTML syntax (bold, italic, underline, hyperlink) would be neat too. If it can be used on Win/Unix and used with OpenGL and DX …that would be awesome.

btw. great blog!