nifty-gui

New Feature – Keyframes for Nifty Effects

// October 27th, 2009 // No Comments » // bubble, design

Well, I’m currently rewriting the old Nifty Introduction Demonstration that somehow didn’t survive my last blog server switch It was posted right here but the jnlp disappear. The demo explained some basic concepts of Nifty and it was written in Nifty I’m rewritting it now to update it to the current Nifty Standards.

In the process I just want a moving Nifty GUI Logo like this one

So the logo should resize while fading in and keep on resizing while fading out.

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Effect Reference with little animated gifs … soon

// October 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Ok, I was not able to add a effect reference each day but there was some progress, which is good.

Today I added “imageSize” and I’ve started to add little code snippets and animated gifs to the reference page too. So that the explanation makes more sense and you’ll get some code to start with.

I’ll continue to add effects documentation over the coming weeks

And here is the first with gif and code:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/nifty-gui/index.php?title=Effects#imageSize

Have fun,
void

Nifty GUI sightings – Shiring

// October 6th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // sightings

Shiring is a 2D MMORPG that uses Nifty GUI for it’s user interface. Check out it’s blog

http://blog.shiring.de

and especially the current GUI demo:

This is pretty awesome

To document one nifty effect each day project started =)

// October 3rd, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

I started to document the different nifty effects in the nifty wiki:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/nifty-gui/index.php?title=Effects

I’ll try to continue with documenting at least one effect each day

Another shorter solution to the Nifty Overlay

// September 13th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Uncategorized

Nifty and Slick User Tobse pointed out that you can use the NiftyGameState to create overlays too.

I like his version because it is shorter and much of the details of how the integration with Nifty works (calling render and forwarding input events to Nifty) are hidden from you. However the class NiftyGameState has been designed as a base class for a real Nifty GUI State and was not really planned for overlay rendering.

So I think although both versions work there is still something missing (in both versions). I like the idea of hidding the details on one hand but I’m not sure if using the NiftyGameState is really the way to achieve this.

What do you think?

Click the “Read More” link to see the short version of TestState that Tobse wrote and which is less code than my initial version

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Nifty plays well with others and of course with slick2d too

// September 13th, 2009 // 5 Comments » // design, docs

Nifty can be used as a standalone GUI. So when your game enters its menu or option screens Nifty is all there is on the screen and all user input is handled by Nifty.

When using Nifty together with Slick2d this is represented by the NiftyGameState class. Using this class your Slick2d StateBasedGame can easliy switch from your in game state to the NiftyGameState and display the GUI.

But this is not the only way Nifty can be used. You can easily use Nifty to render your in-game GUI too! Nifty plays well with others (as long as they use OpenGL/lwjgl for rendering that is).

It’s not complicated at all and I wanted to write example code that demonstrates how easy it is for a long time. Motivated by a question at the Nifty Forum at souceforge.net I did now

What’s demonstrated in the new slick example is, how you can use Nifty to render a GUI on top of a normal slick GameState.

Here is a screenshot of the example which renderes Text from within Slick that changes color when you press the keys 1-3. On top of this it renders a Nifty GUI that responds to mouse events. Additionally if you press 1-3 the colored Nifty boxes start to shake

Slick Overlay with Nifty GUI

You can try it out with the Webstart:

http://nifty-gui.sourceforge.net/webstart/nifty-slick-overlay-demo.jnlp

and you can find the example in svn or you can browse it online here:

http://nifty-gui.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/nifty-gui/nifty-examples/trunk/src/main/java/de/lessvoid/nifty/examples/slick/niftyoverlay/ (Java classes)

http://nifty-gui.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/nifty-gui/nifty-examples/trunk/src/main/resources/slick/niftyoverlay/overlay.xml?revision=534&view=markup (Nifty XML for the Screen – overlay.xml)

Keep reading the full Article to see the details on how we get this to work and what you need to consider.

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So and what’s next?

// August 29th, 2009 // No Comments » // bubble

Well, Nifty 1.0 should be quite stable now. It’s probably not perfect yet but you already get a whole lot to play with already

So, what’s next with Nifty?

Write more Documentation:

• Programmers Manual / Introduction to Nifty as a little PDF book is planned. Looking forward to this!
• Reference Wiki for all the Effects and Element Attributes and so on

Make it more usable:

• Allow another “language” to define the GUI in (besides XML). Maybe a DSL in groovy or scala or something else
• Fix bugs and other issues
• Improve the Layout Part and make this more easy and accessible

Make it more modular:

• Nifty now depends on Slick for Sound and Image handling. Some people reported that they don’t want to be forced to be dependent on Slick. So to have Slick as an Option would be a plus (this is already prepared for but was too much work to finish for 1.0
• Make even better Slick integration xD
• Split Nifty into even more modules so that you can only use the part you need (effects for instance could be another jar)

And that’s the current plan!

Have fun!

Nifty 1.0 released

// August 29th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // release

Well, it’s about time:

Nifty 1.0 – Download it
Nifty 1.0 – View Changelog
Nifty 1.0 – Enjoy the Demo

have fun

Nifty Sourceforge.net Updates

// April 4th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // docs

We’ve added a new Wikipage that gives an Introduction to the Nifty Style System:

Effect Tutorial/Introduction

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:

Nifty Gallery at Sourceforge

Nifty Forum at Sourceforge

Have fun,
void =)

1.0 – RC 1

// March 29th, 2009 // No Comments » // bubble

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