How are you guys handling menu type GUIs in your games?

[Ian Price]

I stated my reasons above - I don't hate DDGUI (it's great at what it does) - I just hate the majority of GUIs in games.

[Crivens]

I stated my reasons above - I don't hate DDGUI (it's great at what it does) - I just hate the majority of GUIs in games

Yeah, pretty much what he said.

It's not bad at all, and for business apps is probably the way to go to keep conformity between your apps. But not so good for games. I should re-phrase. What I mean is that for mobile games (which I am more interested in) then a Windows type look and feel doesn't quite feel right, even if you can do a lot tweeking to the looks. It's a bit like how iPaqs failed against iPhones. Make DDGUI look and feel (and I mean that inertia type movement on scrolling, scroll bars, date/time roll bar etc) much more like an iPhone GUI and that would be great.

Cheers

[Ruidesco]

I might be wrong, but by reading this thread the whole complaint seems to sum up to "I want DDGUI to be skinnable so I can modify its looks to suit the mood of my game".

[Crivens]

Not quite. Most decent GUIs tend to have something a bit more cute about them (and it's hard to define what). My current one for example is made up of Apple style buttons which fly towards you then zoom away when pressed. So I guess a list of animations would be nice. But I can't imagine something that generic can be made to be everything to everyone. Sometimes you just don't know how you want a game GUI to look until you have the whole game going. It just doesn't look or act correctly. Something very like Windows 98/XP (IMHO) doesn't really look right on a mobile device.

A good example I saw recently is a snake game which used 3D textured spheres for a menu, and you swiped left and right to rotate the spheres around a planet. Looked brilliant, was quite simple to code really, and fitted the game exactly. But I probably wouldn't use it on my game.

Cheers

[Ian Price]

If you want to see a really, really bad (originally) paid for GUI system then look at MaxGUI for BlitzMax. Fecking awful. It's slow, unwieldy and totally user-unfriendly (I created my own GUI system for BlitzMax which did exactly what I wanted, in a fraction of the time I spent wrestling with MaxGUI to do something simple). DDGUI is none of that and was yet another nail in BlitzMax's coffin as far as I was concerned.

[Kitty Hello]

DDgui is far for being a perfect GUI and it's not looking "native" on anything. That's the biggest downside IMO. Also, the touchscreens won't really like the scrolllbar I put in. Might have to fix that one day. So far, you're better of keeping dialogs so they do not have a scrollbar for touch devices.

The only real awesome benefit of DDgui is, that it's written in GLBasic and thus runs on all platforms supported. You can make a GUI program on a GP2X and without much hassle it pretty much scales if you choose the right font.

A native GUI (Win, Lin, Mac) is one of my long time dreams, because it would push GLBasic in another target audience sector. It's pretty on top of my TODO, so don't expect many new platforms next year

[bigtunacan]

@Gernot,

Pretty much what everyone else said.  I'm using DDGUI currently for "I T&A" (my upcoming level editor).  It is great as far as window style GUIs go.  You are supporting some great core functionality, it is cross platform, supports touch screens, all real good stuff.  I agree with you that having "native" feel would help you gain traction with a different audience.  I'm personally not interested in doing trad apps in my free time; I would just as soon stick to something I enjoy; so games it is.

For my level editing tool DDGUI is definitely the right choice.  For my games though I'm typically just throwing on some clickable/touchable/slideable pictures and then adding some cool effects appropriate to the game.  Maybe they fade in, or shoot in from the side of the screen, maybe they pulsate, maybe the button is attached to a SFX; whatever works.  It is always pretty custom to the particular game; so I just write something fresh and light weight for that type of stuff. 

This is in no way a put down of DDGUI; you've really done an excellent job with that and with GLBasic as a whole; that's why I bought it!  Keep up the great work!

[Slydog]

I prefer to make my own GUI.
That way it does what you need exactly, and you understand how it works and can make quick changes and updates.

However it may not be easy.  I've probably spent 300+ hours on mine, mainly because I'm so picky!
The main feature I wanted was to make sure it used polyvectors, plus drew the entire GUI at one time to minimize draw calls.
(My entire gui takes 2 draw calls, one for the GUI and one for the fonts).
And it had to be fully skinable!

It is mainly a gaming GUI, for portable devices.
I made my own kinetic (flick) scrolling (see 'glow' screen below), like on an iPhone, very tricky stuff!
Plus my version of left / right pages, easier but still difficult.

I would release it for everybody except that it basically uses my entire library for sprites, files, vectors, etc.
I may one day make it more stand-alone, but that may take a while.

Here's a couple of screens, both using the same code but different skins:

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Minion]

Ive not really used DDgui, so I cant really complain. But the thing that put me off using it was the fact that it did look so generic. I think it really should be skinable, if its going to be used in games (and choice of font). The other thing is can it be scaleable ? Ive only seen one game on my phone use it (Spots) and it was so small that I could barely see it, and what with me having big stubby fingers, I kept pressing the wrong buttons.

[MrTAToad]

You've got to set it for a nice vertical size for phones - probably could have increased it somewhat for Spots, although no-one ever mentioned it in the reviews...

[Minion]

You've got to set it for a nice vertical size for phones - probably could have increased it somewhat for Spots, although no-one ever mentioned it in the reviews...

One thing I did try with spots, not sure if youve been told about it, but I changed the resolution it was using from 480x800 to 800x480 (just for a laugh to see what would happen). Now it only displays the top left corner of the screen strectch to fill the screen, so now I can no longer access the options to change it back ;( Must dig into it at some point and find where you svae the settings so i can delete it and start afresh.

[MrTAToad]

No idea where it would on webOS unfortuately...

[Ian Price]

Min's using Android, not webOS.

[Kitty Hello]

DDgui can use any font you select. If you don't hard-code widget sizes, the gui will scale to the font. There's also a global varaible to specify the minimum size for each widget, so you don't end up with 16x16 buttons on a retina display.
Skinning sounds nice. I will provide a set of skinned widgets with the new user-widget functionallity.

For games a more animated gui that fits the theme is worth a lot. TimeGeeks e.g. uses a gui that matches the theme nicely.

[monono]

I think DDgui is just perfect, if you need a slightly more complex GUI and you need it fast (for example an editor or a game like a RTS Game with many options). For the "small" games I usually see made with GLB, especially the mobile games, a custom GUI for a few options is not that hard to make. DDgui in the standard design, just doesn´t have the look and feel of a simple arcade game.