Ghoscher's Blog

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1-Introduction to the GUI.
2-Hello control :D.
3-Hello form.
4-Exporting forms easily from Microsoft Visual Studio Designer to FuchsGUI :D.
5-The future of FuchsGUI & some notes.

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This part of the tutorial is the last part of the series..

I don’t know how to organize this post since it’s not a tutorial 😉 so I’ll start with some notes on FuchsGUI.

A post without an image is a dull post 🙂

Textures & Fonts:

As you saw each control takes a Texture2D parameter in the constructor, well… having many textures might have a bad impact on performance, because if you first draw a Button and then a TextBox the GPU will have to change textures.

A better solution is Read more…

___________________________________________________

1-Introduction to the GUI.
2-Hello control :D.
3-Hello form.
4-Exporting forms easily from Microsoft Visual Studio Designer to FuchsGUI :D.
5-The future of FuchsGUI & some notes.

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Okay, if you’ve been following the tutorials, you should have noticed how creating controls is somehow uncomfortable :(…
The first place where I used my gui was an artillery simulation project in XNA.
I had to make lots & lots of modifications to the forms of the simulation, If I wrote the code for every form manually I might have lost my mind and started screaming something like “Damn! this button should be 3 pixels lower”, “ops! this textbox should be wider :(“…

But before getting deep inside the gui of the simulation an idea came to my mind :D.
Why troubling myself with writing 1** lines of code for a single form while I can generate the code from Microsoft Visual Studio??

I’ll have to admit it’s a little lame to use the Visual Studio designer but I found it better than wasting time programming a designer :).


The main idea of the code generator is:
-Running a pre-made Visual Studio project (windows forms application) with a reference to the dll  FuchsGUICodeGenerator ( Looooooooong name :D).
-Creating a new Windows.Forms.Form in the project.
-In the file Program.cs choose the form you created (more details later).
-Compile & run the project.
-A pre-made form will show and ask for generation options.
-You click a button and a complete class code is generated & copied to clipboard on demand :D.

We’ll recreate the calculator from Part III.

That ends the headlines :), let’s get to the details. Read more…

___________________________________________________

1-Introduction to the GUI.
2-Hello control :D.
3-Hello form.
4-Exporting forms easily from Microsoft Visual Studio Designer to FuchsGUI :D.
5-The future of FuchsGUI & some notes.

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In part 2, I demonstrated how to create two types of FuchsGUI controls : Button & TextBox.

Well, most FuchsGUI controls have similar constructors, this lesson should be quite simple, what we will do is a simple calculator that adds\subtracts two numbers, the reason for this is to show you how to get values from TextBoxes & how to use Forms.

So create a new XNA 4.0 game , add a reference to FuchsGUI.dll (you might wanna go back and read step a in Part II)

Add the using directive first

using FuchsGUI;

Add these fields to Read more…

___________________________________________________

1-Introduction to the GUI.
2-Hello control :D.
3-Hello form.
4-Exporting forms easily from Microsoft Visual Studio Designer to FuchsGUI :D.
5-The future of FuchsGUI & some notes.

___________________________________________________

Disclaimer :

-Please before reading note that this gui is for PC only, with some changes it might become runnable at the XBOX360

-The tutorials are for the XNA4.0 version, it’s just a matter of default parameters ( which are not -AFAIK- permitted in .NET3 c# ) , if you’re still using XNA3.1 maybe it’s time to move on :).

-This post doesn’t contain the FuchsGUI dll, please wait for the next post, but I really recommend reading this post if you’re willing to use my gui :).

Introduction:

An important thing any game or simulation needs is a good, reliable & simple graphical user interface (GUI), of course you can use System.Windows.Forms to create a gui for your XNA game but to me I prefer a gui from within the game, XNA code only :D, with this you can place the gui controls anywhere in the game window (I don’t know if it’s possible with Windows forms).

-ALRIGHT get to the the point already!!!
The point is that I’ve recently programmed a simple yet powerful gui library for both XNA3.1 and XNA4.0, The project started with XNA3.1 then was completed in XNA4.0

Here’s a teaser screenshot where I used my gui for an artillery simulation I programmed with two of my colleagues 😀

Please note that blurry text issue is now fixed, check the last part of the tutorial to download the fixed version

might not be that eye-catching cuz I created the textures in a hurry & using only mspaint

The beginning of the project started with Read more…