Unconventional UI setup advices

Troubleshooting gui
1

To explain a litlle I’m not doing any games. The setup I’m trying to achieve is for live performance, mainly audioreactive stuff. For now, I already have an undecorated “pseudo fullscreen” window on my second monitor. I’ve also some GUI window based on swing on the first monitor. This allows me to change variables, activate things and so on.

But I would like to make this better, so here are the questions:




  • I would like to have a third window displayed on the first monitor. It’s to show a scaled down version of the main output. Is there an existing function for that?


  • Can I use niftygui to make my secondary window (settings) instead of swing? The thing is that I’m dynamically generating the ui so does this suits nifty? One other thing it that the interface will look more like a graph of “nodes”. So I need to draw lines between draggable “panels”. Possible?





    2 “nodes” based ui that look like what I’m trying to do:

    vvvv (really what I want to accomplish ): http://vvvv.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/large/images/pitch_on_pole.png

    a slightly more complex one (recommend watching this one): www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCC9uHHAEuA
2

jME doesn’t support multiple rendering windows.



Nifty isn’t a “solid” GUI. By that I mean it’s not like swing. You could make a settings window but it has to belong to the rendering window.



Maybe what you could try/do is use a client/server setup. You could make a rendering window using jME that would communicate with the other (server) app that would contain the Swing settings or a second rendering jME with a minimal preview + settings or even a preview of what it’d looked like. If the result is satisfying you could “save that state” and have the other (client) window update to those new settings.



That’s one way to look at it.

3

Thanks a lot. I will continue the swing route as I don’t like the idea of another server/client (I’m already doing that with OSC for sound analysis but I’m trying to also remove it).





For the “realtime cloned preview”. Is it possible to clone the main render output texture?

4

If by that you mean making a screenshot, then yes. You could save that and load it in the swing side of the app.



I don’t have a link handy but if that’s what you’re looking for, search the forums, there’s several thread on how to do that.

5

I’ve found a snippet to copy the render to a texture, exactly what I need: http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/groups/contribution-depot-jme3/snippets/single/15/



Thanks again madjack. I still need some time to feel at home with jme3 but I’m already doing much more than I was with processing and other alternatives. Awesome engine and community :slight_smile: