Canvas popout windows

This article is a stub. You can help the wiki by expanding it.

Background

Currently, the GUI can only be placed inside one view/window (see Docs/README.multiscreen) but it would be nice to be able to move windows between views.

Problem

It's possible to do, but it's definitely not trivial. There are two showstoppers:

• Canvas uses nested cameras, not viewer-level slave cameras. You can only assign another GraphicsContext (another window) to slave cameras as nested cameras inherit their GraphicsContext from the main viewer camera. I think Tim Moore mentioned somewhere that he had a patch to move Canvas to slave cameras, but I'm not too sure.
• CameraGroup hasn't been thought out from the beginning to support dynamic creation of windows. At startup the property tree in /sim/rendering/camera-group is read and the specified windows/cameras are created. I guess supporting this would require some architectural changes to CameraGroup.

References

References