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I've been considering writing my own UI framework. This is mostly because I have some relatively specific requirements for it- namely, integrating with my own hardware-accelerated 3D graphical code. The question is, what are the minimal primitives I can expose from the rendering code and still be able to render a wide series of controls, like combo-boxes and drop-down lists and such, and in addition, is doing that even feasible?

I will only need relatively basic controls to begin with and could implement others on an as-needed basis. Right now, I only expose rendering text and rendering a texture.

Puppy
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  • If you want an actual framework this is going to be lots of work. Just look at things like GTK, WPF, Qt or Swing – they're huge and usually for a reason. If you just want something that looks and behaves roughly like controls then of course it's much less work. – Joey May 28 '11 at 23:17
  • Yeah- I'm not trying to write the next WPF here, the whole thing can implemented as I need it, rather than implementing an entire framework at once. – Puppy May 30 '11 at 12:56

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Random things that come to mind :

  • Draw text (done)
  • Draw textures (done)
  • Access individual pixels (huge must for custom drawing)
  • Allow for transformation matrices
  • Different blending modes (add and alpha-add, mainly)
  • If your underlying 3D rasterizer allows it: drawing lines, curves, path.

With this I think you can do a pretty wide range of stuff already.

user703016
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