CEGUI (Crazy Eddie's GUI) Forums

EDIT by Kulik for the googlers: CEGUI has inbuilt animations since 0.7.2 - viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5049 http://www.cegui.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Animation_System

Hi Everyone,

Recently while working on my Ogre school project I created a small animation engine for CEGUI. It animate CEGUI windows based on keyframes defined in a xml file.

It can animate CEGUI::windows using all CEGUI properties, including
position
size
text
image
alpha, and more

The full source codes and a youtube video sample are found at http://www.gamedboy.com

It is rather painful to animate CEGUI windows in codes, so I hope this would be useful to the community.

Jeffrey

Hey thanks for sharing this! Using XML instead of code seems a good apprauch! I'll have a look at your code and see if i can make this a sticky thread or put in on the wiki.

Bye.

hiya

cant seem to find a link on your site for this could you point me in the right direction pls as this seems to be extly what i been searching for

Same here!
Where is it?

Hi guys,

I might have a copy of this laying around somewhere. For next weekend I'll see if I can find it, check the license, check it still works, and if all is well, upload a copy

CE.

bump?

Sorry guys. I missed this weekend. I'll definitely get around to it this week (meaning in the next couple of days).

CE.

Ok, I found the archive file I had for UIAE.

Be aware that this code is still a third party item written by and copyright Jeffrey Jiang. The package was released by the author under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share alike 3.0 license.

Please also be aware that I have not had time to test this at the moment, and as such I do not know if it works at all; all the usual disclaimers apply. I am just making it available as a favour to the community since it appears not to be available elsewhere at present.

The file can be downloaded here

I'll try and do some testing sometime soon, in the mean time please feel free to post your experiences (though do not moan and nag - this is not my product, and it appears the author is not responding here at the moment).

CE.

I personally tried it once just for fun one afternoon but did not succeed in using it. Surely I did something wrong, but I don't know what

It looks quite interesting though.

heya thanks

will try and test it sometime this week

btw is there any plans to add something like this into cegui itself ?


thanks

I'm 99% likely to be spending this weekend on CEGUI related dev work (whoo hoo!) - mainly attacking the outstanding bugs, but I also hope to get time to try this out. I'll post a 'log' of my experiences once I get around to doing it

maori wrote:btw is there any plans to add something like this into cegui itself ?

I don't think it's something we've discussed at any great length.

There is actually the beginnings in the system for a window to have a 'Task' assigned to it, basically to transition from one state to another (or whatever) over time, though this is largely unused at present, and probably needs some expansion / work. There's certainly nothing XML based currently.

A while ago (meaning, years ago) I had some plans to expand the Imageset to support animated image sequences - this is something that may come to fruition, albeit maybe not Imageset based anymore (yes, CE is the master of doublespeak!). What I mean by this is that for the eventual renderer updates, while the Imageset concept will still be present in the system, it will be also possible to reference parts of textures directly, so any animation system would more likely be based on that approach than the current Imageset system (nothing concrete; just my musings).

CE

heya CE

glad to see your feeling better ( i hope i'am right )

i had a go last night to try and get it to work but no joy here i proberbly done something wrong (more than likely ) so if you do get a chance between your dev work pls could you make a basic little tutorial on how and what you did to make it work ie steps needed

Thanks

maori wrote:glad to see your feeling better ( i hope i'am right )

Yeah, I'm on top of the world

Ok. I have spent a little time playing around with uiae and have managed to get it to function.

First a couple of things to be aware of - especially if you did not look at the uiae package yet:
- There are no makefiles / project files provided.
- There is no code example provided (though there is an example animations xml file).
- Documentation is present, though a little sparse

To tackle these points one by one:

Makefiles / Project Files
This is no big issue. The user is free to either make a library or just include all the sources into your app. For the sake of my tests and the example below, I incorporated all the uiae files into my application. All you have to remember is to properly set the include search paths for CEGUI and any other stuff you'll be using, and to add any required libs for the linking stage.

No Example Code
Possible stumbling block for those not used to hacking / figuring out other peoples stuff, though I provide a working example below.

Sparse Documentation
Beggars can't be choosers! There are docs, and where information is maybe lacking, the uiae code is pretty simple to follow; so looking at the uiae code generally yields the answers needed.


Fell at the first hurdle?
Compiling the code gave me my first issue The includes statements, in the files Animation.h and UIAnimationManager.cpp, use the 'cegui' prefix approach:

this is not too much of an issue, at least not for me on linux. The issue I really had was the all lower-case, where we should have had:

Making these changes allowed the code to compile successfully.

Ok. Now we have the thing building, what do we do with it?


The basic usage of uiae is:
1) Initialise the system by calling:

2) Load one or more xml files containing the animation lists (more on that in a moment):

3) Add the CEGUI window that you want to be affected by uiae, specifying an ID string to refer to this window within uiae, and the name of the animation list that contains the animations that you want to use with the specified window:

4) Set the animation state for each window registered. What this basically means is specify which animation from the registered animation list you want to be active on the window. The window is referred to by its uiae ID, not it's CEGUI name:

5) Somewhere within your main app loop, you have to call the update function so that the animations update(!). This takes the same input as the CEGUI::System::injectTimePules function, so is easily called in the same location:


Now some further explanation.
For this you should refer to the sample.xml file in the uiae distribution, this is the file we loaded in step 2 above.

In step 3 we added window 'wnd' - this is a pointer to a CEGUI::Window. The "1" parameter is a unique ID string that you choose to refer to the Window within uiae. The "misc" is the name of an animation list that has been loaded. If you look in sample.xml, the first animation list defined in there is called "misc" and this is where that came from.

In step 4 we set the animation state. This basically specifies the specific animation from the animation list ("misc" from step 3) that we want to be active at the given moment on the window with uiae ID "1" (which we also specified in step 3). In the code for step 4 we specify "bounce". If you again look at sample.xml, within the animation list named "misc", there is an animation named "bounce" - this is where that came from.

Step 5 is performed, as mentioned, in your main loop and tells the uiae system how much time has passed, in seconds, since the previous call to update.

Final, working code example
Below is the code for a complete working example (well, it works here anyway!). It uses OpenGL/GLUT and is somewhat hacked together, with some nice global variables thrown in for good measure. Most of the code is setup code or code to make the demo run (GLUT callbacks for CEGUI events and rendering). The steps above are commented where they appear in the code. Steps 1 through 4 are in main, while step 5 is in the drawFrame function.

Note also that I hard coded in the resource manager paths from my system. Obviously you may need to change these to be something more appropriate for your own systems!



Just to reiterate, this is not supposed to be a shining example of how to code - it's just a quick-and-dirty hack that shows uiae in action.

Hope it's useful

CE.

CrazyEddie wrote:Hope it's useful

it is! very nice "article".

Thanks CE

very usefull and just what i need

stilll have a injectime pulse problem for the dx9 and tooltips here but when thats sorted i be able to play more