I would like to have a tool to debug 2D planar meshes. I would like to be able to display them and debug to be able to debug certain things.
Is there a widget (for any toolkit on Linux - QT, GTK+Cairo, ...) which would display the images, scroll them and zoom it. Is there any widget which would handle it (without need to implement zooming, scrolling etc. by hand)?
Side requirements:
Needs to work on CentOS 6
I need it for C++. Unfortunately changing the build system in my situation is harder then it sounds.
The Qt Graphics View is certainly a useful tool, it gives you scrolling, zooming, rotating easily. You probably want to learn the basics of Qt before. (and Qt is in C++).
Here's an off the wall suggestion.
This would be fairly easy to implement in a web browser. Web browser engines already have the base functionality for resizing and scrolling over images. You may need a little JavaScript to bind it together, of course.
So why not use WebKit? There are bindings for many of the leading toolkits (e.g. QWebView for Qt), so you could take your pick of which one you're most comfortable with.
Yes, it's overkill. But it's code you don't have to write, and time is money.
Related
As a hobby, I've been working on remaking an old video game, and I want to avoid reinventing the wheel where possible. The game is heavily GUI-based, but the GUI needs to be customized in terms of look-and-feel, and also needs to work with 3D OpenGL rendering for a few game screens.
To give you an idea, here's a screenshot from the initial prototype:
There's a lot of animation used, and 3D also, but the GUI widgets behave much the same as in a standard desktop application.
Thus far, I've been using my own GUI library (it's not robust or complete, and I've been running into some problems).
I've been considering migrating to Qt given it's reputation and impressive features, and some of the nice screenshots on the Qt website. But I've never used Qt before, so I don't really have an idea of what it's capable of, or what kind of time investment would be required to learn it. (Note I've used FLTK).
My question is: would it be possible / practical to use Qt in this situation?
UPDATE: After mocking up some game screens in Qt, I've decided not to use it. While it supports many of the features I need out-of-the-box (particularly through Style Sheets), I need to support custom bitmap-based pre-rendered fonts (I can't convert/replace them). And I can't subclass QFont, or reimplement it without it breaking in future Qt releases. That said, I was extremely impressed with Qt (both in its ease of use, and good documentation). I will be borrowing some of its features for my own engine. Thank you to all who provided input.
It's hard to know everything your game needs to do based on a screenshot; however, I will echo the sentiments of other posters here and provide a couple of avenues for you to look at.
One, is that you might want to consider QtQuick over the GraphicsView Framework, but this REALLY depends on what you need to do. I just want to throw it out there as an alternative so you don't miss it. This tutorial uses QtQuick to put together a really slick looking connect four style game. This may be more simplistic than what you want to go for, but then again, maybe it isn't, it depends on what you need to do.
Second, before writing custom paint events for all of your buttons, I would consider using Qt Style Sheets and style your widgets in a CSS like syntax. This will allow you to change the look and feel of your GUI in a very flexible way really quickly. Based on your screenshot, I think you can get what you want out of style sheets much faster than subclassing and rolling your own setup. But once again, it's hard to know based on one screenshot. Here's an example of a dark and orange GUI that was implemented using only Qt Style Sheets. The border-radius property of QPushButton's style sheet would give you the rounded buttons (ref).
The simple answer has been given above but to throw some more thoughts in: yes it's possible, you probably won't need to fight against Qt too much. For the most part the recommended advice for going to heavily customised widgets like that is subclass and implemented the paint event yourself.
You can then use a load of basic drawing primitives to get the basic shapes for the elements and expand from there. There's actually a couple of questions on here with really good resources about how to do it.
I'm a Rails/web developer with little experience with C++, so I'm not totally sure what direction to head in: I'm looking to build a simple simulator that I can use to test an algorithm I'm building that converts standard images to radial coordinates, and all I really need to be able to do is to plot points (which will represent LEDs) on a blank window and continuously refresh them (the LEDs blink). I don't want to build a gui; command line is fine, as I'll be the only person using the tool.
I'm not sure whether this is even possible or not... I did some Java programming years ago and I remember being able to pretty easily open a window and render images in it. Is there a C++ equivalent?
Thanks in advance!
What you are describing is a perfect fit for a GUI application, rather than command line, as far as I understand.
But if you want something really simple, and not spend some time learning a GUI development framework (MFC, Qt, WxWidgets, etc), you should check the following resources:
character based basic console graphics
some more advanced console graphics with blinking, box drawing, etc.
using full GDI graphics on console
It's not that easy in C++, because there is no standard way in doing this. It's not part of the language. There are a lot of frameworks though, some lightweight and some bloating. It also depends your platform. Anyhow, I think I would use OpenGL and do that calculation thing in a shader. That way you don't have to recompile and rerun all the C++ code. You can even do it in way that updates the GPU shader whenever you save your shader file giving you immediate results.
I have programmed in HTML, Java, CSS, C++, VB, an Python.
I'm looking to make button that looks completely the way I want it to look!
Like in HTML+Java+CSS, I can do that very thing!
I'm using Netbeans IDE. I was about to just use OpenGL to do the GUI programming for my programs, since it is so hard to find information on customized GUIs.
I just want to learn how to make the image and give button functionality to it. I want to be able to make the shape, color, and effects (when clicked, hovered over, etc).
Oh, and I program in Ubuntu Linux!
Any help would be appreciated!
Qt is a good idea, but you won't learn how it works, though it's not really important and far easier like that. Using C++ you will have libraries that respect the encapsulation principle, so you won't know at the first sight how do is work, just how to use it.
If you really want to code a button yourself, you can take a 2D drawing library such as SFML, with which you'll draw your button and handle events on it.
When I wrote a custom button class for my app, we (the C++ developers) were given PNG images from the designer department. They are much better with tools like Photoshop then we developers. We just showed image1.PNG by default, image2.PNG when the mouse was over the button ("hover"), and image3.PNG when the mouse was over the button and pressed. Drawing? Not necessary.
Color is trivial for designers. Shape isn't hard either. PNGs are rectangular, but can be transparent. So rounded edges are just a matter of a few transparent pixels there.
I'm making a game with OpenGL render api. Now I need in level editor. It should consist of lots of widgets parents/children etc, so it's hard to write need widgets by hands.
Any ideas about good gui-system which can be easilly connected with opengl? The most important part is gui editing. I really need some editing-tool for it.
Thanks
You should have a look to http://qt.nokia.com/ .
It is very easy to inject the OpenGL rendering into Qt widgets.
To easily edit your GUI, you can use Qt Creator ( http://qt.nokia.com/products/developer-tools ).
You have several options (and this has been answered before, but probably not exactly like this):
SDL: very good abstraction layer for audio, graphics and anything related. It will force you to write your widget stuff by hand.
Qt: has an OpenGL module that makes it easy to set up an OpenGL context. It will make widgets and everything very easy.
wxWidgets: same as Qt, but has slightly worse documentation and tools (if I might be so blunt)
I'd go with number two: it has a beautiful Designer tool to create Widgets with all the fancyness you'll need. OpenGL is also built right in.
If you're running Windows (can't confirm Mono will do it), another option would be to use C# and WinForms to make your life significantly easier.
Check out CEGUI:
http://www.cegui.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
It defines its GUIs in XML and has editors for it.
I am exploring a possibility to write a kind of a notebook analogue that would reproduce the look and feel of using a traditional notebook, but with the added benefit of customizing the page in ways you can't do on paper - ask the program to lay ruled paper here, grid paper there, paste an image, insert a recording from the built-in camera, try to do handwriting recognition on the tablet input, insert some latex for neat formulas and so on. I'm pretty interested in developing it just to see if writing notes on computer can come anywhere close to the comfort plain paper + pencil offer (hard to do IMO) and can always turn it in as a university C++ project, so double gain there.
Coming from the type of project there are certain requirements for the user interface:
the user will be able to zoom, move and rotate the notebook as he wishes and I think it's pretty sensible delegate it to OpenGL, so the prospective GUI needs to work well with OGL (preferably being rendered in it)
the interface should be navigable with as little of keyboard input as user wishes (incorporating some sort of gestures maybe) up to limiting the keyboard keys as modifiers to the pen movements and taps; this includes tablet and possible multitouch support
the interface should keep out of the way where not needed and come up where needed and be easily layerable
the notebook sheet itself will be a container for objects representing the notebook blurbs, so it would be nice if the GUI would be able to overlay some frames over the exact parts of the OpenGL-drawn sheet to signify what can be done with given part (like moving, rotating, deleting, copying, editing etc.) and it's extents
In terms of interface it's probably going to end up similar to Alias' Sketch Book Pro:
picture.
As far as toolkits go I'm considering Qt and nui, but I'm not really aware how well would they match up the requirements and how well would they handle such an application.
As far as I know you can somehow coerce Qt into doing widget drawing with OpenGL, but on the other hand I heard voices it's slot-signal framework isn't exactly optimal and requires it's own preprocessor and I don't know how hard would be to do all the custom widgets I would need (say color-wheel, ruler, blurb frames, blurb selection, tablet-targeted pop-up menu etc.) in the constraints of Qt. Also quite a few Qt programs I've had on my machine seemed really sluggish, but it may be attributed to me having old PC or programmers using Qt suboptimally rather to the framework itself.
As for nui (http://www.libnui.net/) I know it's also cross-platform and all of the basic things you would require of a GUI toolkit and what is the biggest plus it is OpenGL-enabled from the start, but I don't know how it is with custom widgets and other facets and it certainly has smaller userbase and less elaborate documentation than Qt.
The question goes as this:
Does any of these toolkits fulfill (preferably all of) the requirements or there is a well fitting toolkit I haven't come across or maybe I should just roll up my sleeves, get SFML (or maybe Clutter would be more suited to this?) and something like FastDelegates or libsigc++ and program the GUI framework from the ground up myself?
I would be very glad if anyone had experience with a similar GUI project and can offer some comments on how well these toolkits hold up or is it worthwhile to pursue own GUI toolkit in this case.
Sorry for longwindedness, duh.
Have you tried FLTK? It is made with 3D graphics programming in mind and has interfaces to OpenGL. I wrote some FLTK->Scheme bindings and found the API to be real fun to work with.
OpenGL font support is terrible, in my experience. It sounds like you're going to have to develop all your own custom widgets anyway so don't even bother with a toolkit. You'll spend more time learning the toolkit, trying to figure out how to get that toolkit to work with OpenGL, and and trying to figure out how to make your special widgets in that toolkit than you will just rolling your own. I wouldn't give this advice in just any situation but it sounds like your application and your widget set is going to be very unique. Make a superclass for all widgets, define a draw method, even handler methods, etc., for override, and you've already done most of what those frameworks would do for you.
Also I'm sure you know this but this is an enormous project so you should initially narrow it down to a few simple objectives for a first iteration.