Canvas widgets: Difference between revisions

The point of the canvas widget demo is to demonstrate how powerful and flexible the new canvas system really is, i.e. it cannot just be used for aircraft scripting (instruments, MFDs), but also for GUI scripting - which means that using the canvas system would unify the 2D rendering backend (all can be handled via canvas), while reducing the amount of C++ code we have doing these things, which would mean that the GUI system could be entirely maintained in scripting space, i.e. as part of the base package, by people who don't need to know C++ - some basic Nasal knowledge will do.

Basically, adopting the new canvas system for such and similar purposes, will mean that tons of old/oudated C++ code can be phased out and replaced by a single consistent implementation in C++, that is using modern C++/OSG code - which ultimately also means that OSG itself can make more assumptions about what's being rendered, so that more optimizations (= better frame rates) can be more easily accomplished by using OSG coding patterns and protocols, instead of outdated/custom/3rd party libraries which would need to be manually baked into the existing FG/SG/OSG eco system.

Now what's cool about the canvas system is that it's integrated in such a fashion that it will keep working with the old GUI code still in place.In addition, all of the exsting GUI features (layouting, XML processing) are implicitly supported due to the way the canvas system is implemented. These are real roadblocks when implementing a new GUI library next to PUI, because all of the existing stuff would need to be explicitly ported (either in C++ space or by converting tons of XML files).