We’ve added a new Wikipage that gives an Introduction to the Nifty Style System:
It’s not completly finished yet but should give you some more informations about effects in Nifty.
Additionally we’ve removed the old Screenshots Page from the sf.net Nifty project website and enabled the much cooler gallery feature. And there is now a sf.net standard forum enabled for the Nifty project too:
Have fun,
void =)
I’ve just commited some final changes to the loader to svn.
Finally everything is in place again. Changing the loading code was a lot more work than expected. But adding a preprocessing step was the key to solve all the issues and get the code much cleaner.
As an additional benefit nifty now knows for every attribute from which style it came from. So removing a style and replacing it with another one on the fly is supported 
We’re now testing the current version in svn with an actual game. When everything works ok the 1.0 release of nifty gui will be available soon - for real this time 
In the meantime you can follow nifty development at twitter
Adding Documentation on how and where to “svn checkout” Nifty and how to build it with Maven:
Building Nifty from Source Wiki Page
I’ve now updated the Nifty Dependencies in SVN (for the Nifty 1.0 Release) to the following Versions:
Besides that I realized that I’ve already had setup a Nifty Maven Repository at Sourceforge. This was meant to store Nifty releases to allow other Projects that use Maven and Nifty to easily access the Nifty libs. So for instance you just need to add:
<repositories> <repository> <id>nifty-maven-repo.sourceforge.net</id> <url>http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-maven-repo</url> </repository> </repositories>
to your applications pom.xml and it will automatically find the Nifty dependency So far so good.
BUT
Today I realized that I could use the same approach to get Lwjgl and Slick2D easily under Maven control. So when switching the Versions to Slick #239 und Lwjgl 2.0.1 I deployed both libs to the Nifty Maven Repo at Sourceforge!
So what does this mean for you?
It means just one thing. It’s now easier then ever to build Nifty! Just “svn co” it from Sourceforge and execute “mvn package” and it should automatically download all required libs without any changes!
Nifty!
Screen Reference added to Nifty Wiki
more planed. stay tuned
Nifty was meant to read everything from XML files. But sometimes this is not enough because you need to decide from within your code what needs to be created.
This was possible in older versions of Nifty but was kinda tricky.
With Nifty 1.0 (currently available in svn) this has been improved. There are now special classes available to create and configure the build-in elements like Panel, Text, Label and Image.
Example use:
CreatePanel createPanel = new CreatePanel(); createPanel.setChildLayout("horizontal"); createPanel.setHeight("8px"); createPanel.create(nifty, screen, parent);
There is now even support to dynamically create your controls with a CreateCustomControl class.
Nifty stuff
A Nifty Effects Reference Page has been added to the Nifty Gui Wiki at sourceforge.net It’s still work in progress but it already lists all standard effects that are available and it documents all of the standard parameters that are available.
void
… actually I really want to release Nifty 1.0 at the end of 2008.
But as we added feature after feature, well, things got a bit unstable and pretty ugly (To be honest … fubar :). So some parts of the controls broke, some demos broke and parts of nifty turned to crap.
I tried to fix it, but especially the loading code (loading xml and creating the runtime nifty object tree from it) got to messed up for any repair.
So we took a break from it.
But now we’re back!
I’ve started rewritting the loader code and everything looks shiny, new and great again. It’s not finished yet (control loading is still missing) but it’s looking much cleaner than the old stuff.
BTW: I’ve invented a small little side project while rewritting the loader. It’s kinda another XML Java Binding Project that is based around my own little XML-Schema Definition called “Lightweight XML Schema” (lwxs). The project still relies on XPP3 for xml parsing. You can basically describe what your xml file looks like (exactly like XSD but much simpler) and then you can easily read a matching XML file to some representation in java. It’s all very simple but made the loader pretty easy
And mind you, only the loader was broken! The Nifty core engine has not been changed and is still pretty solid
So hang on! Great things are about to happen!
void
PS: New Wiki Documentation Project for Nifty GUI started.
PPS: Nifty 1.0 - probably available this year! :o)
Here is a quick preview of the new Default Controls and the new Nifty 1.0 Style.
Note the awesome effects on the checkmark when I toggle the Checkbox and watch the Keyboard only usage in the second part of the video
Nifty GUI New Style and Control Preview from void on Vimeo.
Nifty 1.0 - probably available this year! :o)
Have a Merry Christmas and watch out for the upcoming Nifty GUI Release!
Nifty 0.0.5 adds support for a Drop Down Control. Here we show how to actually use it.
XML
First of all you need to add the standard Nifty controls to your xml. To keep things easy for the moment we use the default Nifty styles too.
<!-- load default styles and controls -->So adding a Drop Down Control works like adding any other control:
Basically you address the control you want to add, in this case it’s “dropDownControl”. And you need to give your control an id too, so that you can reference it later (”dropDown1″).