CEGUI (Crazy Eddie's GUI) Forums

I've been having some weird issues with trying to follow the documentation (including the API docs), and somewhere along the way of trying to do so, I must have done something wrong, as CEGUI renders nothing (and I don't even see a CEGUI log in the directory).

To be specific about my documentation problems - a number of functions referenced in the API class listing seem to not exist, which I have never seen before. A number of functions in various tutorials seem to not exist, but that I understand can be from outdated wikis and such. An example of missing functions would be FontManager.createFromFile( string ), which I found in a tutorial (I forget which) but doesn't seem to be mentioned at http://static.cegui.org.uk/docs/current ... nager.html . Most of the success I've had came from the beginners guide (http://static.cegui.org.uk/docs/current ... orial.html) and the tutorial 7 on the Ogre site. Are there other up to date documents on how to operate CEGUI? Because so far I've been pretty perplexed.

I thought I might have had some sort of version mismatch, but the docs say 0.8.3 and my package is version 0.8.3-2, so it should be the same. Otherwise, I am using 64 bit Arch Linux.

Moving on to my specific issue, I've done my best to try to put in everything mentioned in the various things I've read, but CEGUI seems to render nothing. I only get the teal OGRE background (color I set it to). As I said, there is no log for some reason, perhaps related to this problem, but here is the output to the console:



The source that initializes CEGUI is:



And what initializes OGRE is:



Everything with OGRE seems to work as I can do other things with it, like put in manual overlays.

I'd be happy to help update the wiki once I know what I'm doing, but I'm afraid I am pretty far from that!

SOLUTION: should have been calling Ogre::Root::renderOneFrame(), not Ogre::RenderWindow::update().

Hi there,

I would say that if you're getting no errors, no crash and no CEGUI.log, then you may have forgotten to call the function that initialises CEGUI

CE.

Bakaiya wrote:I'd be happy to help update the wiki once I know what I'm doing, but I'm afraid I am pretty far from that!

Even better would be having additions to the official docs. The doxygen files are part of the 0.8.3 files so you can easily supply a patch when you do changes to them. We will gladly incorporate them into the official docs. Wiki is of course fine too but people should look into the official docs, where it is also easier to distinguish between versions.

I also have to admit that the docs are currently not very good. Something that would definitely improve if we had further information in the official api docs in the beginner's guide together with some code snippets of full initialisation code examples and how to handle stuff in input/gameplay/simulation loops.
Regarding the functions you are missing: Did you look at the samples? Each sample initialises the files it needs. For example:

CommonDialogsDemo.cpp:

It seems my CEGUI package didn't ship with the samples (or at least, I don't know where they are if it did). I downloaded the official source and I'll take a look at them - hopefully that will clarify my confusion. Thanks for pointing me to those!

I am sure it is that I am missing some sort of initialisation or update function, I just thus far haven't been able to discern which. Working examples should sort that out, though.

I haven't had much experience dealing with doxygen, aside from reading what it generates, but if my little project ends up going anywhere (which is a big if) I can look into it. I can't really promise anything, but at the very least I'll try to fix any errors I come across on the wiki; I'm kind of just trying to make a little program as a summer project and I haven't even programmed seriously in about 2 years.

Anyway, thanks for the help and I'll see what I can do with the samples.

The Samples are only really useful for initialising resources and features of a specific sample. They do not contain good compromised code for initialising CEGUI itself or updating it, although you would find these things in the SampleBrowser.


Here is how to access the defaultGuiContext. Unless you want to render to multiple contexts (multiple completely separate windows) then this is all you will need:

You have to inject timepulses (passed time) into the cegui system and the defaultguicontext (or all contexts you use) each frame.
You need to inject mouse and keyboard inputs to the guicontext(s) you use. You also have to inject window size changes.

You can call CEGUI::System's function "renderAllGUIContexts" safely if you use only your defaultguicontext or if you do RTT in a way that this won't be an issue. This will call the Renderer and render all guiContexts.


All this information should be put into the API docs in a well written form after checking that it works. If you would be able to help this would be great. If you have problems with following my instructions or if they do not work please ask. I might have forgotten something.

Sorry for the delayed continuation of this, I got distracted for a bit and just came back to my project. I was able to solve my problem, which it turns out was related to calling the wrong Ogre function. So, essentially, it was their problem, not yours. I was calling window->update(); (ogre's window) which worked when I was messing with overlays in ogre, but apparently doesn't work for anything other than overlays because of how I created the window (and I don't think it was actually supposed to work for those, so I am somewhat confused why it did... that's what gave me the false sense of everything working right in ogre). I changed my call to ogreRoot->renderOneFrame(); and now it works. Now I was just messing with the geometry buffer and had some issues, but it's probably my fault and I need to look at little more closely at what I'm doing before I really say anything about that.

That said, I only just got it actually rendering CEGUI, so I only have a single non-working button at the moment. I'm happy I finally got that, though. I appreciate your explanation since that's essentially what I have to do now that it renders and that indeed isn't all that clear from the samples (although I was able to work out most of the startup from the samples). I'll let you know if I have any other problems, which is likely. Once it's all working (or mostly working) I'll see about helping out with docs based on my experience; but right now, any such effort would still be the blind leading the blind.

Good you got it working.

Sure. We very much appreciate any work on the API docs (or any other docs/wiki) because usually we are all busy with actual programming and bug-fixing (which, aside from GSoC, is all done unpaid and in our spare time) so we don't really have time to spend on perfectionising the docs. Of course if you create a patch / pull request for the docs I will have time to look over it to see if it seems correct/complete and then they could be merged into CEGUI.