Offscreen rendering with nifty gui?

Troubleshooting gui
1

Hello together,

I want to implement dynamic screens (MFDs) for a space game like a radar display, status indicator and so on…
Is it possible to perform offscreen rendering to Nifty elements? If yes, how?

Regards,
Harry

2

Yes, that’s possible.

Basically, you update your elements in code. I would recommend you to read the tutorials about Nifty in the wiki.

Best regards,
Domenic

3

One year ago when I used Nifty for the last time there seemed to be only the possibility to generate textures by loading a texture file. Thus the only option I know from is rendering and exporting to a texture file and reopen it by nifty. This is exactly the thing I didn’t want to do.

Is there a possibility to directly retrieve a Texture2D object from a Nifty panel?

Regards,
Harry

4

Depending on your screens… maybe nifty is overkill for what you want to do?

There are certainly easier ways to pop up some off-screen renders in a HUD.

5

Yes I know but offscreen rendered panels is not the only purpose. Lets say: I have a Gui defined using switches, buttons and menus and so on… Nifty XML offers a good tool base to efficiently structurize a Gui layout but I wanted to combine the Gui layout with rendered parts (2D or 3D or whatever) like:

  • A configurable radar screen consisting of clickable buttons/menus and a panel containing a 2D grid with all the objects.
  • dynamic shield and hull damage display containing a 3D model of the vessel indicating damaged zones and labels for descriptions. Also a Nifty (or whatever) button to allcoate repair priorities.
  • 3D orbital diagram showing vessel trajectories relative to an celestial body overlaid by labels giving exact numerical information. A button or a Drop Down menu is required to switch through the reference bodies. You can see this in Orbiter space flight simulator: http://smithplanet.com/stuff/orbiter/dockingimages/sync12.gif

etc…

So our current problem consist of two points:

  • In Lemur the access of Texture2D objects is very simple but we do not know a structured way to efficiently define Gui layouts so we have to code them manually and watch the layout directly within the app by starting and stopping the application.
  • On the other hand Nifty comes with a closed tool chain (XML, Styles and built in editor) but with difficult implementation of dynamic textures (We don’t know the way to retrieve a Texture2D reference).

Regards, Harry

6

Yeah, but if you think you will expose nitfy’s XML to a user as a “configurable UI” then you are in for lost of fun, I suspect.

Either way, if you are letting end-users configure a UI then you will want to come up with some sort of simplified abstraction.

I’m not sure what this means. Don’t you have to do this with nifty XML also? I mean, the SDK has an editor built in but in my experience that starts to become unworkable pretty quickly… especially if you have off-screen rendered elements or anything that is code-backed or remotely dynamic.

7

Use a separate Viewport to draw onto a texture. Then apply that texture to a Nifty Image element.

Nifty nifty = your Nifty instance;
Texture2D tex = the offscreen texture;
Element image = screen.findElementById("ElementId");
ImageRenderer renderer = image.getRenderer(ImageRenderer.class);
renderer.setImage( new NiftyImage(nifty.getRenderEngine(), new RenderImageJme(tex)) );

For this to work, you have to disable Nifty’s texture atlas (Batched Nifty Renderer). You do that by using the right constructor of NiftyJmeDisplay.
This one for example:
NiftyJmeDisplay(AssetManager, InputManager, AudioRenderer, ViewPort)

You’ll have to find out yourself if it’s really a good idea to do it this way :wink: I thought it was too much hassle to use Nifty for the HUD so I’m using simple jME elements.

8

Which is essentially what Lemur is with some nice sugar on top. Just in case you ever need anything fancier than manual raw positioning and/or want clickability, etc…

9

Thank you very much. You just gave me some new ideas to check out.