Future CEGUI release announcements

[Ident]

All future CEGUI release announcements will only be featured on the NEWS section in our new homepage.
We did this because forum and wiki simply are not good places to announce news. We have also ported all old news to the new cegui news section on the main page.
You are always welcome to discuss the releases in a meaningful way in our forum by creating a new topic with a meaningful name such as "0.8.4 release changed framewindow behaviour". Try to choose an appriopriate forum for any discussion. Thank you!

[Bertram]

Hi there,

Out of curiosity, I wondered whether you could also give a few words what's the next expected step for CEED.

I've seen what you're working on for CEGUI in the news section, but didn't find anything relatively recent for the editor.

I just thought it might help with new contributions.

Keep up the good work and best regards,

[Ident]

In the near future a new snapshot of CEED will be released for Windows and other platforms. When this will occur is up to kulik because I'm not nearly as proficient with the whole process as he is. This snapshot will contain a lot of fixes that were implemented since the last snapshot, which happened more than a half year ago.

In (very?) distant future we would like to implement a way to skin widgets in CEED. To be able to do this in CEED, we will need to do some important changes to CEGUI, which will allow to skin existing widgets more easily and in a different way than it is currently done. Currently it is required to copy the whole LNF of a widget into a new LNF/scheme and change the apprioriate images and definitions, which can be tedious and feels clunky. I would like to see all the unnecessary copy-pasting redundancy gone. In some cases making a new widget can make sense though, for example some of the skins actually do skin a widget quite differently and therefore need an entirely new widget definition.

What I would like to see in CEGUI is having generic widgets for each widget type (Button, Editbox, etc...) which can be used as a base for inheritance. A skinned widget would merely inherit the parent widget and redefine the images. The resulting inheriting widget would, after parsing, work as fast and efficient as a regular widget. Images and specified dimensions would just be overwritten by the skin and applied during parsing of the widget. CEED could then be extended with a Skinning editor that creates new LNF's based on the generic widgets, and then lists the attributes of the widget that can be overwritten via inheritance. I think this could provide a simple way to skin widgets and doesn't require touching the XML files directly.

Kulik mentioned that he would prefer an approach for skinning similar to how CSS definitions work in web design. We have both not come up with a full concept for either of these approaches and have not yet discussed which one is the preferrable one. So please consider this just as purely conceptual for the moment. However, in my opinion, a LNF editor is definitely the most important feature CEGUI could use at the moment to be more valuable to developers.

[Bertram]

Thanks for your answer on this.

While like many others I do think a look'n'feel editor would be great, I understand this is not easy. I'm lookng forward those changes with excitement.

But anyhow, CEED deserves more light, and I do think you should give a few words about it in the news from time to time.

Best regards,

[Ident]

What kind of news should i write about CEED if there are none currently?

I agree CEED needs more attention. Like i said in my previous post, CEED development to me is the most relevant part of CEGUI development currently.
But if there is nothing to say, then I can't make a news for it. I can ask Kulik if he has news for us but I don't think he has any either.

EDIT: Removed my bad jokes.

[Ident]

I changed the original post - I ported our ENTIRE news from the wiki successfuly to our website CMS. They can be seen on the news page now. A big thanks to timotei who provided a script for wiki news export.