Look no further!

The Nifty GUI Wiki has been updated and the <screen> Tag and all of its attributes have been explained and documented!

You can find the reference here: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/nifty-gui/index.php?title=Elements

Have fun,
void

And there is an updated tutorial/demo available too:
Nifty 1.2 – Updated Tutorial/Demo

Nifty 1.2 Tutorial/Demo

The Tutorial/Demo has been greatly improved and updated with Nifty 1.2 informations and is *THE* source to learn how to use Nifty!

Important Information

Please note that starting with Nifty 1.2 the main nifty.jar is now independend of lwjgl and slick2d. This means you need a nifty-<system>-renderer.jar for your rendering system! For instance, if you would like to use Nifty with a Lwjgl based rendering backend you will now need to download nifty-1.2.jar as well as nifty-lwjgl-renderer-1.0.jar!

Please note that we assume that all of the required jars of your rendering system, like lwjgl.jar, slick.jar and so on are downloaded by yourself. The nifty-<system>-renderer.jar only acts as the adapter between nifty and your rendering backend. They don’t come with all the required libs. This decision was simply done under the assumption that Nifty comes as an add on to an existing application.

The Nifty 1.2 compatible jme2 renderer will be available soon after the 1.2 release and Nifty 1.2 will be integrated into jme3 soon as well.

have fun

Nifty gives you an easy to use framework that you can extend with your own ideas. Just like Nifty user zozo64 did. Nifty is missing drag and drop support? No problem! He created his own!

To be honest, he found some bugs too but all of that improved Niftys core systems. So that’s a good thing. We’ll probably bring his work as a standard drag and drop control into the standard controls project soon.

For the moment you can take a look at the code. It’s part of the nifty examples project:

http://nifty-gui.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/nifty-gui/nifty-examples/trunk/src/main/java/de/lessvoid/nifty/examples/dragndrop/

And here is a first preview of zozo64 work:

Nifty Basic Drag and Drop from void on Vimeo.

Every attribute of every Nifty element can now contain a special markup “${…}” that gets replaced with something else when the xml is loaded.

Example:

<text text="your home directory: ${ENV.HOME}" />

The “${ENV.HOME}” will be replaced with your $HOME environment variable!

You have the following options now to use this new feature:

• ${id.key} lookup resource bundle with “id” and request “key” from it. This is explained in more detail below.
• ${ENV.key} lookup “key” in the environment variables (System.getEnv()) and replace ${ENV.key} with the value received.
• ${PROP.key} lookup “key” in the new Nifty.setGlobalProperties(Properties) properties or if the properties are not set this will use System.getProperties() to lookup “key”
• ${CALL.method()} call method() at the current ScreenController and it is replaced with the value that method() returns. method() should return a String in this case.

If for some reason the replacement does not work out then nothing is replaced and you’ll get the original ${…} String back.

Localization Details

Currently Nifty Localization is using standard Property file based Resourcebundles. This simply means you can create a property file containing keys that are referenced from the xml files.

Example:

dialog.properties:
hello = Hello World in Default Language

dialog_de.properties:
hello = Hallo Welt in Deutsch

dialog_en.properties:
hello = hello world in english

Once you have created these files you need to register the resourceBundle “dialog” with Nifty so that Nifty knows that it exists. You can do that with the new “resourceBundle” tag:

<resourceBundle id="dialog" filename="src/main/resources/dialog" />

Now that Nifty knows about your resourceBundle you can access it with the method mentioned above:

<text text="${dialog.hello}" />

Now Nifty will use the current set default locale to access the ResourceBundle with the id “dialog” and looks up the value for “hello”. If you don’t like that Nifty uses the default Locale you can set the Locale that Nifty should use with the “nifty.setLocale(Locale)” method.

Nifty stuff and Kudos goes out to lynorics!

void

Nifty GUI New Grey Style from void on Vimeo.

… and being very creative with style names we call this one “nifty-style-grey”

You can already svn checkout the project from svn here: https://nifty-gui.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/nifty-gui/nifty-style-grey/trunk or browse the source online here http://nifty-gui.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/nifty-gui/nifty-style-grey/trunk/.

Together with the “nifty-default-controls” project – which provides the Standard Controls – you can already start to use the shiny new awesome grey design!

A released version will be available together with the upcoming Nifty 1.2 Release.

But remember, Nifty is not at all about the controls only. You can build whatever GUI you like! This new style is meant as another demonstration how shiny and nifty you can make GUIs look with Nifty GUI. But when you are happy with the look of the new style you are of course free to use it or modify it or just stare at it, like I do

Have fun,
void

The actual parsing of Nifty-XML files is still using a XPP3 based parser and does not require a XML-Schema Definition. The nifty.xsd was only added to validate Nifty XML-Files … as well as for special support of the jMonkeyEngine3 SDK but that will be explained somewhere else

XML-Validation is now build into Nifty but is still an optional step you can use to ensure your Nifty XML is well formed and valid. To perform the actual validation two new methods have been added to the Nifty class:

public void validateXml(final String filename) throws Exception
public void validateXml(final InputStream stream) throws Exception

Both methods will simply return or will throw an Exception when any errors have been detected.

To successfully validate the nifty xml file, your xml file should start with the two following lines:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<nifty xmlns="http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty.xsd" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty.xsd http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty.xsd">

This way the XML-File is using the correct Nifty Namespace. If you would omit these declarations your XML-File can still be parsed but it will probably not validate against the XSD.

The namespace that has been definied for nifty is actually the URL where you can download the xsd too: http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty.xsd

In-Text changes of Textcolor

Up until now Nifty uses the “binary” character value 0×01 directly in the text to indicate that the next three bytes in the text will contain red, green and blue values that represent the color of the text that follows after the color definition.

So you could write a red word, example:

<text text="a word in &#01;&#255;&#0;&#0;red"/>

This works but is unfortunatly not a valid XML file when trying to validate it with an XML-Schema Definition The problem is, that a valid XML attribute value must not contain values below binary 0×20 (with only a couple of exceptions, like the tab character 0×09). 0×01 is not allowed and will always create a validation error! So the current solution is to use a new format that doesn’t use 0×01 as a indicator anymore. Instead Nifty will now watch for the special String “\#” to mark the beginning of a color definition and “#” as the end. So instead of the xml example given above you can now write:

<text text="a word in \#F00#red"/>

Which is more readable too!

There is a short Version supported “\#F00#” as well as a long version “\#FF0000#”. Both are not case sensitive so you could write “\#fa9#” too. But remember the trailing #

Have fun,
void

Hudson will svn checkout all relevant nifty projects and will then “mvn clean deploy” them to the nifty maven repository at sf.net. This means that all projects that are already being build with maven and have this in their pom.xml:

<repositories>
    <repository>
      <id>nifty-maven-repo.sourceforge.net</id>
      <url>http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-maven-repo</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>

will automatically get the latest nifty builds!

Currently this means 1.2-SNAPSHOT for Nifty as well as the Nifty Default Controls and the black Style projects and 1.0-SNAPSHOT for the new Nifty Renderer Projects.

Currently the following projects are build each night.

Nifty
http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-maven-repo/lessvoid/nifty/
http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-maven-repo/lessvoid/nifty-default-controls/
http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-maven-repo/lessvoid/nifty-style-black/

Nifty Renderer
http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-maven-repo/lessvoid/nifty-lwjgl-slick-renderer/
http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-maven-repo/lessvoid/nifty-lwjgl-renderer/
http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-maven-repo/lessvoid/nifty-slick-renderer/
http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-maven-repo/lessvoid/nifty-java2d-renderer/

The JME2 Renderer currently has some weird problems being automatically build. So this is not yet available – still working on it:
http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/nifty-maven-repo/lessvoid/nifty-jme-renderer/

If you’re not using Maven you should still be able to get the SNAPSHOT jars from the URLs mentioned above. Just find the sub directory 1.2-SNAPSHOT or 1.0-SNAPSHOT and get the latest JAR from there. Don’t mind the name of the jar tho. It’s automatically generated by Maven and it’s just named with the build date and time.

Good luck!
void

You can find a list of all RenderDevices for Nifty 1.2 in the Nifty wiki.

There is now a Nifty Renderer test bench project availabe too. This project can be used to verify correct rendering while a new RenderDevice is being developed.

void

http://jmonkeyengine.com/blog/blog/2010/04/06/jmonkeyengine-3-0-gets-a-very-nifty-gui/

http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/forum/index.php?topic=11246.msg98829#msg98829

And besides that, the current Nifty SVN has all dependencies to LWJGL and Slick2D removed! Nifty is now completly independent of the actual rendering system!

There is a lwjgl-slick2d renderer already available here:
http://nifty-gui.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/nifty-gui/nifty-lwjgl-slick-renderer/trunk/

There is a work in progress JME2 renderer available here:
http://nifty-gui.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/nifty-gui/nifty-jme-renderer/trunk/

And the friendly people over at http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/ are already working on a JME3 nifty renderer too!

If you want to create your own Nifty renderer for some other rendering system, well, you can do that now too!

Take a look at the http://nifty-gui.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/nifty-gui/nifty/trunk/src/main/java/de/lessvoid/nifty/spi/ ServiceProviderInterface for Nifty rendering. What about a Java2D implementation?

void

And there is a special new tutorial/demo available too:
Nifty 1.1 – New Tutorial/Demo

nifty tutorial screenshot

have fun