CEGUI (Crazy Eddie's GUI) Forums

Directed towards EDDY:

Hey Eddy, I had a question about the newer v0.7.1.

I was working on a game project back in Spring 2009, and I heard the NEWER version of CEGUI was supposed to be less resource hog.
My main concern is the TEXT for the GUI.

The previous version had all the text as triangles (each letter), and I heard the newer version was supposed to be different.

Were these changes made for v0.7.1?

Thanks.

Hi,

Well text is still drawn as triangles - it's the lowest level renderable element there is, so there's no way around that (and we never said there would be). However, what has been added is a facility whereby the final output can be cached to texture and reused in subsequent renders. For example if you have 10 thousand text characters to be drawn, that's obviously 20 thousand triangles; we can now cache that output and on subsequent renders, it will only be two triangles - hence it should be somewhat quicker (because drawing triangles will normally be faster than drawing 20 thousand, right?).

Now, due to the fact that some windows will have content that changes often, while other windows will be largely unchanging, CEGUI can not know which windows would benefit from this caching and which would not. So it is basically left to the library user to specify which windows should be cached and which should not (this is controlled via the AutoRenderingSurface property, though there are other ways also). The default provided skins/looks have this property enabled for FrameWindow only - mainly as it's the level at which our samples will largely benefit. Out in the real world, there will be much better configurations specific to each application.

As an aside, the rendering surface is also used/needed for certain other aspects of the lib, such as effects and rotations and so on.

HTH

CE.

Hey Eddie, I have another Question...

Do you know if the newer Ogre3D binary (v. 1.7.0 RC1 from Dec 2009) has the newer CEGUI v0.7.1 ?

If not... could you explain how to import the newer v0.7.1 and overwrite the older library files?

Thanks.

Hi there,

The newer Ogre releases (from 1.7) will no longer come with a version of CEGUI included in the package; the renderer module for use with Ogre is now back in our tree This means to get the renderer module built so that it is compatible with the latest Ogre you will need to build CEGUI yourself from the source package (IIRC the prebuilt module in the SDKs is for Ogre 1.6. something). Please see Obtaining the code and Supported systems and compilation in the documentation. Since you'll be building from source you might consider the v0-7 stable SVN branch, since it already contains some fixes made since the 0.7.1 release.

Just to clarify, CEGUI is not removed from the Ogre releases for any reason other than the fact that they were provided with an extremely light-weight Ogre specific alternative system that better suits the level of UI required for their samples. This is a decision we fully support, and we are looking forwards to continuing to support Ogre as a renderer in the years ahead

CE.