GUI systems

Troubleshooting gui
1

Well



I have looked through the three GUI systems I could find to JME


  1. BUI


  2. Swing


  3. fengguie



    BUI seems nice and integrated but also quite old and unfinished?



    Swing looks like windows in a 3D world. I am not sure it can do what I want



    Fengguie seems nice but I havent made it work yet.



    Basically I need a 2D GUI on top of a 3D world. But I also need to render 3D into my GUI panes (not sure swing can do this). I also need something thats easy going?





    What are you guys experience?



    Middy


2

If you’re needing high-performance, closely coupled with 3D, then I would suggest FengGUI, I haven’t much experience with it yet, but there’s a tutorial here:



http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/wiki/doku.php?id=integrating_fenggui_with_jme



Swing can be made to look any way you want via the different look and feels.  I’ve had a lot of success with the Substance look and feel:



https://substance.dev.java.net/



However, Swing can cause some serious slow-downs in your game if you’ve got a lot of interaction going on with it.

3

Hi Middy,



You can incorporate your own gl code in FengGUI. We have a special widget that restores the default opengl states and adjusts the view port accordingly. Check out the ViewPort example here. It uses JOGL but it makes no difference for LWJGL except that you are using a different binding.



Let me or Whackjack know if you encounter a problem or when you have a question.



Johannes

4

oh well now I am seriously in doubt.



I'd like to render animations into my widgets but not at the cost of complexcity and loss of JME(sounds like that if I have to use lwjgl)



I am not sure I have much choice with swing other than make different 2D images and load them into some JPanel.


5

i don't want to sound like the bui defender but bui is not old(it works with the cvs version of jme ) and it's used in a commercial product (which means that it's still in development)



as for the animations you want to render in your widgets: could you be more specific? do you mean animated models or do you mean some 2d animations?

6

Well I would like to show textured rotating spheres in a widget and other small animations

7

as widget decoration or as widget contents?

…hmmm i suppose that doesn't make any difference and i'm quite sure both frameworks can do that. bui has something called GeomWindow (or similar) which renders a node in the gui. i think i saw something similar in fenggui

8
middy said:

I'd like to render animations into my widgets but not at the cost of complexcity and loss of JME(sounds like that if I have to use lwjgl)


jME uses LWJGL as well. ;)
9

Yep i know that JME is based upon lwjgl. But can I take a Jme-node which is an abstraction and add it to a widget?  The difference is if I should trouble myself with OpenGl or use Jme framework.



Seems like I should pay BUI another visit.