Lemur/SimTools Patch-stravaganza

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From the things that were on my mind recently, what about the following points in general? I know it may call for much more time than a couple of days, but since you’re asking:

  1. Officially include a way to implement elements clipping. For example, incorporating a ViewportPanel would do. There is a currently available contribution from @NemesisMate, it is very useful but it comes with its own rather big library with lots and lots of code. It would be nice to have this particular feature finely-cut natively in Lemur. Here is the related thread: Sharing of debug & lemur utils

  2. A related issue is the absense of an easy way to create scrollbars for the clipped area (there is no such issue currently in Lemur because there’s no clipping). Currently there is a way to use sliders for it, but I would vote for a more explicit way to add and unilize scrollbars. For example, there’s one hardcoded and baked-in in the ListBox class, but I think it should be a separate class with a well-defined interface. It could be an extension of Slider just as the Button is an extension of the Label, and just as easy to add/remove and configure.

  3. The above two points converge on the one I’m actually trying to convey: add a built-in concept of a window. One of the first things working with a GUI library is to expect it to allow creating windows. That may be not so true when you think of many of game GUIs, but for example Nifty has it, and definitely there are games that can make a good use of windows. And a window draggable by a title bar (Draggable Window in Lemur) would be a very welcome addition.

  4. What about incorporating TrueType support as a part of Lemur or an official plugin? There is a Lemur fork from @Tryder which is great, but it is based on an older Lemur version and introduces breaking changes to it. Here is the thread we had on it: Lemur texts and fonts (Lemur + JME-TTF ?) - #9 by noncom

  5. Expose word wrap modes for the text (were talking about it here Word wrap in Labels etc - #21 by noncom)

  6. Fill in the absent wiki sections, like:

I’m not sure how much the points 1-4 are relevant, but them are what I constantly think of when working with Lemur. Since I was doing a forum research on this, I find that the topics are pretty recurring, so it might be a good idea to deal with them. This might not be a simple work for a day or two, but I would like to know what you think of these points. And if you approve the concepts then even if you won’t have time to work on them in the near-term, a contribution from me or other forum members is possible.

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