CEGUI (Crazy Eddie's GUI) Forums

We use CEGUI for a basic console for our game engine. Our console is similar to the example console in the CEGUI Samples. It uses Taharez and is made up of:

DefaultWindow (created programatically)
--FrameWindow (console window)
----Listbox (text buffer)
----Editbox (text entry)
------Listbox (auto complete window)

The auto complete window is initially hidden when the console is displayed. As soon as the user types in character(s) that match a given set of commands, the auto complete window pops up, and the user can select from a list of possible commands (or keep typing to narrow it down further). With 0.6.2 this works great:


0.6.2

With 0.7.1, it appears that the auto complete window is being clipped by something (the rect of the FrameWindow?):


0.7.1

It's all on a DefaultWindow, so I wouldn't have imagined the clip to happen. I have tried adding ClippedByParent to the FrameWindow, but it resulted in the same. Here's my layout:


On an unrelated note, I set the Alpha property of the console to 0.7 in the code. It appears to be much more transparent in 0.7.1 (as apparent from the screenshots above). Did something change with this recently?

The clipping issue is caused because the FrameWindow will be using a texture to cache the rendered content of the FrameWindow and all it's child windows. This leads to an issue with children not clipped to the FrameWindow area, because the texture is only large enough for the FrameWindow. There are a couple of options, the first is to disable the texture caching for windows affected by this, you can do this by setting the AutoRenderingSurface property to "False" for the FrameWindow in the layout. The other alternative is to not have the AutoComplete window as a child of the FrameWindow, though this potentially makes window management more complex for you.

The alpha issue is known, and has already been fixed for most renderers (grab a snapshot release or use svn branch v0-7 to get these fixes). The only place this issue still exists is in the Irrlicht renderer where it's not currently easily fixed, and (I believe) in the WGL pbuffer based texture target implementation - which will be fixed this weekend. You should find however, that if you disable the AutoRenderingSurface as described above, this issue will also disappear

CE.

Adding that property fixed the clipping issue. But now the client portion of the frame window is riding on top of everything else.



Also the cursor is apparently moving behind the window (although this was happening before I added the property)

Is this the OpenGL renderer? It's probably a state issue, did you enable the 'extra state settings' via CEGUI::OpenGLRenderer::enableExtraStateSettings? If not, that will likely fix this other issue

CE.

mark~

This seems to be an universal issue with using ClippedByParent=false and having AutoRenderingSurface=true in a parent window. Since most people will be using FrameWindows as their main top level window type I think one will see more of this issue.
Would it make sense to make it so that if a window is having AutoRenderingSurface=true, and has a child which has ClippedByParent=false, then if that child extends beyond the parent for one render call this will be handled automatically?
I'm not that versed in how the AutoRenderingSurface feature works, but would one solution be to disable that for those specific render calls when when the aforementioned situation occurs? Or would it be more efficient just to extend the render geometry to also encompass the area of the child in that render call?
Or would a more optimal solution be to use a different render geometry for the child window and stitch the two together?

Yeah, I think I'll have to try and come up with something! With AutoRenderingSurface enabled, the window is texture backed, and all rendering for that window (and attached child content) is done to that texture. The issue is that the texture is the size of the parent window, so when parent clipping is off and a child should fall outside the parent, it's rendering is still clipped to the edge of the texture.

The solutions available are either to make the texture larger, which wastes video resources, or to do something whereby appropriate children get rendered some other way - though the issue is then that if the parent is using some render effect, or is rotated, the 'unclipped' child content, since it's not rendered back to the parents texture will be unaffected by such effects / settings. So given those choices, I think larger texture is the only acceptable solution.

CE.

Ah thank you!

I was having similar problems using Ogre 1.71 & CEGUI 0.7.1 with OpenGL, very odd behavior. I was trying to adapt the Drag & Drop Sample to Ogre's Tutorial 7 code, as soon as I'd start dragging the DragContainer would disappear. Moving the cursor all the way to the left of the screen would make it start to appear again. I also had non-moving StaticImages hidden.

Setting
<Property Name="ClippedByParent" Value="False" />
<Property Name="AutoRenderingSurface" Value="False" />
directly on the StaticImages under the DragContainer fixed my problem.