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== 2022 == | == 2022 == | ||
=== Replacing PUI === | |||
{{See also|PUI#Replacement_status}} | |||
Update 09/2022: The PUI replacement was going to be Qt but it started to get very complicated with changes in Qt 5.15 + Qt 6, so James is going with a more light-weight approach now. | |||
Qt added support for Vulkan / Metal / D3D starting in 5.15, but FlightGear / OpenSceneGraph can’t support those, so integrating the two renderers went from being ‘complicated but ok’ to ‘very very complicated’. | |||
So now James is going with something much more lightweight using some C++ compatibility code, some Nasal for styling and the existing widget rendering from Thomas Geymayer (TheTom) with some extensions and additions: some pieces are in FlightGear & FGData already. | |||
James has basic dialogs working okay but not the more complex ones and everything looks kind of ugly, he needs to improve the visual look before he shares screenshots to avoid everyone freaking out :) The disadvantage of this approach is James is far from expert at creating visual appearances this way, so it’s kind on unrewarding and slow for him. If someone likes messing with CSS-type styling, border-images and hover-states, ping him since we could probably move things also faster <ref>https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/mailman/message/37701750/</ref> | |||
The PUI limitations should be gone ‘soon’: actually James is now focused on getting dialogs working; on macOS we use a native menubar (not PUI) inside FG which can handle sub-menus just fine. | |||
If someone out there wants to work on the UI for menus / menubar part, just ping him directly, he can suggest some steps to start working that way. (Basically creating the view code in Nasal for menu items, menus and the menubar, and handling the different visual states of the above, such as an item being disabled, showing the keyboard shortcut, eliding too-long item names, hover feedback, timers to open menus / sub-menus on mouse-over: it’s all pretty standard stuff) | |||
This does *also* need C++ parts, because the internal menubar structure /also/ needs some additions to support sub-menus, and the add-ons themselves would likely need some tweaks in the XML to integrate with that. So in total there are quite a few changes in this ’simple’ request, but this is often the way with software development :)<ref>https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/mailman/message/37701747/</ref> | |||
{{Main article|pui2canvas}} | |||
In February 2022, James reported having something in progress locally, and that should even be something we can try in March/April 2022. Hopefully that’s quick enough, knowing it has been a long time coming.<ref>https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/mailman/message/37606439/</ref> | |||
It’s split between Simgear (see classes with widget / layout in the name) and in FGData. (Eg widgets/Button.nas) To be able to use the existing dialog XML files un-modified (which is a design goal), James is extending the widget types with many additional ones (eg PUI has slider, dial, combo-box, checkbox, all of which need to be created - this is about 30% done and is the bit he's very slow at). Thomas’s widgets have a very good separation of API + state from appearance, so all styling is in its own file, and James is being very strict about maintaining this separation, so we also retain the re-styling feature of the PUI UI, which many people also rely on. This does make the process of adding new widgets more complex, however. | |||
The other thing is to preserve all the layouting : James has added a grid layout to Simgear, since that is supported by the existing PUI code (even though the layouts are not actually part of PUI itself). The problem is getting the sizing / hinting of all the widgets to match the PUI values, so that dialogs look approximately the same under the new UI as they did with PUI; again this a design goal so that all existing dialogs in aircraft and add-ons, which we can’t update, continue to work and be usable. Debugging that is also proving quite tricky, since there’s all kinds of hard-coded assumptions built into PUI widgets about pixels, font-sizes etc which are not true in the new system.<ref>https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/mailman/message/37701792/</ref> | |||
=== XMLDialog.nas === | === XMLDialog.nas === | ||