Simple GUI and Menu system

I’ve been silent in the blog for the last couple of weeks mainly because I was on vacation and then cleaning up and commenting all the code I’ll introduce in IGF v0.4.0.0. During that time, a few of IGF v0.3 users came back to me letting me know they found a very annoying bug: Deferred renderer wasn’t working on Xbox 360 and worse freezing the system.

I was really surprised as I test all my samples and they all worked on Windows when I switched from Forward to Deferred rendering. Since I’m adding nothing special for Xbox 360 Deferrred SunBunr rendering, I was really sure it would work as is on the console too: I was wrong!

I raised the point to John at SynapseGaming as stepping through the entire rendering pipeline, I couldn’t find any reason why such thing was happening and he told me he’ll have a look at it.

I’ll therefore wait this bug to be solved before releasing the IGF v0.4.0.0 which I had ready for a release today

However, I won’t stay inactive until then and decided to move on working on the next set of features. For v0.5, IGF will gain two new features that are highly related design wise and one of which received a lot of votes in the Feature Request system: a Simple GUI & Menu system.

I already had a working prototype and I started porting it to IGF which was achieved really easily (couple of hours). I’m now testing it on my systems to make sure it works in all cases

As usual, adding a new feature to IGF starts by adding a manager to the SunBurn SceneInterface in the Application.InitializeSunBurn() method override. This time you’ll add the GuiManager like this:

// in your own Application class override
public override void InitializeSunBurn()
{
   SunBurn.AddManager(new GuiManager(GraphicsDeviceManager);

   CreateRenderer(Renderer.Forward);
}

Then, adding a simple Label in your game would be as easy as the following code in your GameState.Initialize() overriden method:

/// <summary>
///   Initializes the GameState. Override this method to load any non-graphics resources and query for any required services.
/// </summary>
public override void Initialize()
{
    // we retrive the GuiManager instance
    var gui = SunBurn.GetManager<GuiManager>(true);

    // we create a Screen instance in which we'll be adding Controls
    var testScreen = new Screen(100, 100, true);
    // we then create a Label passing the SpriteFont path and the initial text string
    var testLabel = new Label("Fonts/MenuItemFont", "Hello World");
    // we ask the GameState to PreLoad the Label SpriteFont
    PreLoad(testLabel);
    // we add the Label to the Screen
    testScreen.Add(testLabel);

    // we finally add the Screen to the GuiManager
    gui.AddScreen(testScreen);
}

You may be wondering why we need the Screen class? Well, it’s basically a container that will ensure the rendering is performed only when required (state or property changes). Moreover, if you look at its constructor, the last argument is a boolean and it tells the Screen if it should render to screen directly or not. If you set this to false, you’ll have the ability to get all controls rendered through the Screen in a Texture2D that you’ll potentially want to use in a 3d quad instead of rendering directly to the screen.

Here is a simple example of the Menu system rendered on Textures and used in multiple quads that are placed in SunBurn 3D scene. Hope you’ll find that useful