There are now two main development branches available:

1.3
The branch formerly known as 1.3.1. This branch will be the base for an eventual 1.3.2 release. Mostly bugfixes should go in there but maybe some improvements will find their way into this as well.

master
The main branch and the base for any 1.4 development. This will be an unstable version (1.4.0-SNAPSHOT) for a while but all the new nifty things will be in there.

While speaking of 1.4 there is not yet a final plan for it. We’ll need to sort out all of the bug and feature requests first. Please feel free to suggest other things you’d like to see in the comments or on the forum.

Both branches are available at sf.net and at github. Synchronizing both repos is a manual process at the moment but works pretty good thanks to git!

Ah and one final word about the git repository at sf.net: Unfortunately the sf.net “code / git” menu lists the wrong repository. I’ve talked to their tech support on IRC and this can’t be changed at the moment :/

The “develop” menu has the correct URL which is:

git clone git://nifty-gui.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/nifty-gui/nifty

So the correct URL ends with “nifty” and not with “nifty-gui”! Sorry about this =)

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• Nifty 1.3.1 Download Folder at sf.net
• Nifty 1.3.1 Maven Projects Page (You can browse the JavaDoc online here)

When you’re using Maven, you can simply add our sf.net Nifty Maven Repo to your pom.xml:

  
    
      nifty-maven-repo.sourceforge.net
      http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-maven-repo
    
  

and then you can add this dependency:

    
      lessvoid
      nifty
      1.3.1
    

You can find the nifty-1.3.1-changelog.txt at sf.net.

Here are some informations about Nifty 1.3.1.

GC and other speed improvements as well as Bugfixes

Nifty 1.3.1 should be compatible with 1.3. Its main purpose is improved performance. Nifty has been optimized for better GC performance as well as render performance. You should see more FPS with this version!

Additional standard controls

Thanks to contributions of Nifty user ractoc you can now find a TabsControl, a TreeBoxControl, a ChatControl and a MessageBox in the nifty-default-controls project!

Improved Slick2D Renderer

Thanks to Nifty user mkaring the Slick2D renderer has been greatly updated and improved. So Nifty should work a lot better with Slick2D again.

LWJGL 2.8.2

And last but not least Nifty has been updated to the latest stable LWJGL version 2.8.2. Which was easy since thanks to gemserk LWJGL is in the central maven repository!

Nifty 1.3.1 is not yet in the central. There are still a couple of jars in the Nifty universe that are not available in the central but we’re working on it!

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So, switching to a new LWJGL version was actually very easy. I’ve just changed the existing dependencies in the pom.xml for the nifty-lwjgl-renderer project to:

  org.lwjgl.lwjgl
  lwjgl
  2.8.1


  org.lwjgl.lwjgl
  lwjgl_util
  2.8.1

and that’s all!

As an additional benefit they created a natives plugin that will unpack all of the LWJGL natives in the target/natives directory. When combined with an eclipse plugin this will even add the natives to the native library location inside of Eclipse and … that’s all!

I’ve added it to the nifty-examples pom.xml and now you don’t need to manually specify the “-Djava.library.path= ” setting when you run any of the examples anymore! Works pretty well!

Great work Gemserk!
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Consequently the Nifty projects available in the git repo at sf.net have been updated to 1.4-SNAPSHOT. 1.4 will be build with Jenkins so that you can find nightly builds of 1.4-SNAPSHOT Nifty projects in the Maven Repo for Nifty as well.

If you had svn write access to the Nifty projects before you will be able to push to git now too.

There is one exception tho: The main development for Nifty happens on the “develop” Branch of the individual projects. Consequently the “develop” branch will be automatically build and deployed by Jenkins (1.4-SNAPSHOT). Pushing to “master” is restricted and is reserved for release candidates. This should allow the development to continue freely on the “develop” branch (or on any other branches as well!).

On another note 1.4 is not scheduled yet in any way and should be considered experimental – at least for the time being. So make sure you wear a safety helmet in case it explodes and stuff

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If you had svn write access you should be able to push to the remote git repository.

We’ll keep the SVN repos for bugfixes and an eventually 1.3.x release. Everything else will happen in git

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Get it here:

• Nifty 1.3 Download Folder at sf.net
• Nifty 1.3 Maven Projects Page (You can browse the JavaDoc online here)

When you’re using Maven, you can simply add our sf.net Nifty Maven Repo to your pom.xml:

  
    
      nifty-maven-repo.sourceforge.net
      http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-maven-repo
    
  

and then you can add this dependency:

    
      lessvoid
      nifty
      1.3
    

Here are some quick informations about 1.3.

Lots of Changes

There have been well over 200 changes! Nifty 1.3 fixes a lot of bugs and adds a lot of new features.

To summarize Nifty 1.3 you could say this is the “controls” release of Nifty. Nifty 1.3 was mainly targeted on improving and extending the nifty-default-controls project. The existing controls have been revised/rewritten and lots of new controls have been added. You can find an overview and details about the new controls in the Nifty wiki.

If you’ve used controls with Nifty 1.2 then you’ll need to update your projects since the 1.3 controls are not backward compatible with the old ones :/ Well, the XML part is still working the same but interacting with the controls from Java has changed.

Besides this most of the Nifty core elements (Panel, Image, Text) should work as before. The only difference is that the label element has now been removed and replaced by a label control. So when you’ve used labels before you need to change them as well. This was described before in a former blog post too.

JavaBuilder

Another new feature is the Java Builder pattern that you can use to create GUIs from Java without any XML at all. This feature was described in a former blog post and has now been extended to work with all of the new controls and with the build-in core elements alike.

And a new Demo of course

And here is the Nifty 1.3 controls demo:

If you’re unable to run the demo above, you can watch the video instead:

Nifty 1.3 Controls Example/Demonstration from void on Vimeo.

More in future blogs posts…
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PS: Nifty 1.3 will put the support for the nifty-style-grey on hold for some time. This means that this alternative style is currently not updated to be compatible with 1.3. This is just because of lack of time. We might eventually come back to that style later or if we find a maintainer for that style. Interessted? Contact me!

nifty.setDebugOptionPanelColors(true);

Which will render your screen in pretty colors:

Pretty nifty for finding layout related issues!
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PS: We’re very close to 1.3 … really =)

And then it hit me What would happen, when there are more people joining in? Directly talking about Nifty things and getting feedback immediatly.

So here is that experiment:

Join us this weekend using IRC on irc://freenode/niftygui. That is is the freenode network, #niftygui channel. Or you can join with the freenode webchat.

Here are the details:

28-May-2011, 14:00 America/Los_Angeles
28-May-2011, 17:00 America/New_York
28-May-2011, 23:00 Europe/Berlin
28-May-2011, 21:00 UTC/GMT

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One of the latest additions is the possibility to change the screen resolution at runtime without restarting a Screen or Nifty. All you need to do is to change the display mode of the rendering system you’re using and then simply call:

nifty.resolutionChanged();

to notify Nifty of the new display resolution. Nifty will finish the rendering of the current frame and then it will update the current Screen to the new resolution as well as notifies all active controls.

You can find some details for this on the feature request tracker.

And here is a little video that is demonstrating that it is actually working

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• much faster
• now with a scrollbar
• command line completion with the TAB key
• command history
• colored output
• much more friendly API

Here is the video:

Nifty 1.3 Standard Console Control from void on Vimeo.

and here is the link to the wiki documentation:

https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/nifty-gui/index.php?title=Standard_Controls_Console

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