Falagard tutorial

[lindquist]

I've written a tutorial on skinning with Falagard it's in the wiki.

I just thought I'd announce it here as well for those of you who don't stop by the wiki too often.

I hope it is useful.

http://www.cegui.org.uk/wiki/index.php/ ... g_-_Part_I

[martignasse]

hi lindquist,

It's cool news

I'll look in soon and feedback after.

[martignasse]

hi,

Ok, before all, very good tutorial

I read it with pleasure, even if english isn't my natural language.


so, let's go for the feedback
It's just some little addition for the most part :

I'm still going to give a short description of each item in the list though:

could be good to tell if we'll using it in this tutorials or not (like you do for the last description)

The area is the most complex part of practically all look'n'feels. It is designed to be flexible and uses an extended version of the unified coordinate system of CEGUI 0.4 and up. Besides the regular two numbers containing the relative and absolute component of the coordinate or size Falagard also allows us to use the dimensions of images, windows, text and even properties. We can also perform arithmetic operations on these dimensions to a certain extent.

maybe to much for the first tutorial, it may confuse the noob as you don't use it.
something like "it's powerfull and complex and we just use simple part for now" is more appropriate.

We also wanted the image to be stretched across the whole area of the ImageryComponent. The default formatting in top/left alignment. Not good enough...

We add the formatting tags

<VertFormat type="Stretched" />
<HorzFormat type="Stretched" />
Vertical format must come first. Both sets stretching as the formatting. Which is what we need. That's all we wanted in the look'n'feel so let's have a look at the XML for this extremely simple button skin.

maybe it could be good to said the Format tag is to deal the image mapping in the imagery component, even if the tags are in the imagery component tag (again, noob oriented)

This look'n'feel adds the fully working label (still white) to our button skin. This is starting to become a useful look'n'feel, so let's give it the final touch by adding handling of the three other states Hover, Pushed and Disabled that we left out before.

maybe remind the reader about the z oder of the layer tag stuff

A PropertyDefinition creates a new property in the window that gets the look'n'feel assigned. The property we create is a simple string value, but we choose what it's used for. Not CEGUI.

in the beginning of the color section, you can push up the power of the system, by mentionnung that in this case, things are not decided at c++ stage, but at xml stage.
Could be a good reminder of the beginning of the tutorial when you say

Falagard is a part of the CEGUI core and is implemented in C++. It is completely possible to write a skin in C++, but it's is not very practical. You have to recompile every time you change something. Fortunately CEGUI supports creating a Falagard skin from a custom XML format.

and good milk for designer (who think developper limit there creativity...)

Anyway, thanks for sharing you'r knowledge,
and feedback of feedback is apreciated

[spannerman]

lindquist, that is an excellant tutorial! This is exactly the sort of thing we need. Thank you for taking the time to do this, very good indeed!

martignasse, regarding your comments: I just wanted to say that your points about writing too much complex information in case the reader is an extreme beginner; I dont think that the sections you mention are too complex, or too much information. On the contrary, I think the more information presented at this stage can only be beneficial, especially since there is not a great deal of documentation / tutorials where you might be able to split them off into groups of varying levels of complexity. Just my opinion

[martignasse]

hi spannerman,

Godd point, my comments will become valuable when we'll have tones of tuts

[lindquist]

Hi guys. thanx alot for the feedback.
Marti, I think your comments are good, but Spanner has a good point as well... hmm..

I won't remove any information, but I might do a little read through and take a closer look at some of the extra things that could be mentioned...

Anyway, I've just uploaded part II. It's been lying on my HD since friday, but it seems that everybody wants to party during December, so it got a little delayed

I hope you like it...