GWEN SDL2 GUI Renderer

To try out the new SDL2 SDK I ported GWork (a fork of GWEN) to it.

It mostly went across quite easily, apart from reading pixel values, which GWEN uses to get the colours used when drawing. It is difficult to read pixels in a texture as you don't know the format, so I had to keep a surface. Apart from that though it was fairly easy.

SDL2 renderer Mac OSX 10.8

SDL2 renderer Windows 7

Please read the readme at the Github project for more details. If you have any problems report them at the issue tracker.

Enjoy.

[8/9/13] Premake works for Windows now.

UI for Allegro 5

I found a nice UI system called GWEN. It has lots of advanced features and is very easy to embed. It sits nicely on top of your application and can just be wired into its resources, to save competing systems, e.g. input or texture management.

Example of Gwen UI from the Gwen site.

I ported it to Allegro 5, which was quite easy as the renderer and input abstractions are well designed. I did it on the Mac, but it also works just fine on my old Windows XP laptop. Gwen also provides rendering backends for OpenGL, DirectX, SFML, and Windows GDI.

[Note] I have forked GWEN in order to fix various issues with Allegro 5, etc. There are notes in the readme and on the wiki. You may want to prefer this version if you are using Allegro 5. Please report any issues in the Github issue tracker for Gwork.

If you have used Delphi, or Windows Forms you'll probably find it quite easy to pick up. There are unit test examples from which to learn, but other than that you have to plough through the code at the moment. Hopefully more docs and comments will appear soon to ease the learning curve. There is a small tutorial on doing layout with docking.

One of the things that is really nice about Gwen is the skinning system. It is all laid out in one bitmap, along with the colour scheme at the bottom.

The default skin for Gwen.