Guild of Writers

What can we do with GUI?

As I understand, with standard PyPRP plugin it is impossible to make GUI interface in age.

But I heard that some non standard exporters (branches from PyPRP as I understand) are capable of it.
If so, can someone point me to info about it?

I'm also interest:
is it possible to make GUI "plugins" to KI device? Example of what I'm talking about is visible in Jalak, where You have additional GUI accessible though KI.
I use to though that it's direct part of client exe, but I think that I saw this GUI also in converted to POTS version of Jalak, hence this question.

Standard PyPRP can make a GUI popup but it cannot make GUI buttons for interaction. That is fine for close ups of notes and drawings but it can hardly be called a GUI.

Chloe's contrib has that functionality and much more. It does not come with a manual though. Some documentation can be found here but for most of its new features you'd have to reverse engineer the files if you want to know how to use them, or ask Chloe.

And a word of warning: This version does not do everything the same way as the release version of PyPRP. So expect things to break if you use it with your existing ages.

Edit: the Jalak GUI is a plain GUI, which just happens to be activated by a KI button.

D'Lanor wrote:Standard PyPRP can make a GUI popup but it cannot make GUI buttons for interaction. That is fine for close ups of notes and drawings but it can hardly be called a GUI.

Unfortunately Age which I have in mind will have to use GUI buttons.

D'Lanor wrote:Chloe's contrib has that functionality and much more. It does not come with a manual though. Some documentation can be found here but for most of its new features you'd have to reverse engineer the files if you want to know how to use them, or ask Chloe.

Thanks.

D'Lanor wrote:And a word of warning: This version does not do everything the same way as the release version of PyPRP. So expect things to break if you use it with your existing ages.

I anticipate that. I need GUI buttons for completely new age.

D'Lanor wrote:Edit: the Jalak GUI is a plain GUI, which just happens to be activated by a KI button.

Is "plain GUI" another type of GUI ?
I tried to analyze jlakField.py to get info how "blinking of KI button" is enabled, and general code behind showing GUI, but I couldn't find proper fragments of code.

Egon wrote:Is "plain GUI" another type of GUI ?
I tried to analyze jlakField.py to get info how "blinking of KI button" is enabled, and general code behind showing GUI, but I couldn't find proper fragments of code.

Plain as in common. But somewhat more advanced than your average letter with a single clickoff. GUIs can have activators and responders like anything else. That blinking could be a responder playing an opacity animation.

After yesterday Guild Meeting I have to ask:
Does PyPRP2 is now capable of handling GUI buttons?

Egon wrote:After yesterday Guild Meeting I have to ask:
Does PyPRP2 is now capable of handling GUI buttons?

Not yet. Right now we keep having to play catch-up with Blender to keep even the basic geometry stuff working. Fancy layer stuff is largely missing, and almost no modifiers are implemented yet.

The good news is that the code to handle all of those is already written in libHSPlasma/PyHSPlasma. So when things are ready, it should be fairly easy to add all of those modifiers with nice GUI panels inside Blender

It seams that it would be better for me to wait a little bit more for PyRPRP2, instead of diving into Chloe branch, but can You post some pessimistic, and optimistic estimates about when can we expect working PyPRP with features like GUI buttons?

The Jalak GUI is special in one regard: it is stored in a global PRP file, in the special GUI age. Fan-ages should not do that to avoid polluting the global ID-space (GUI page numbers, in this case). However, while the page could easily be moved elsewhere since it it used in only one age, the button in the KI that triggers it can't. There is no good way for a fan-age to extend the global GUI, porting the Jalak GUI to POTS required heavy modifications of the xKI.py file which no fan-age should ever touch.
This is yet another example showing Uru was definitely not created for the kind of distributed development we are doing here

diafero wrote:This is yet another example showing Uru was definitely not created for the kind of distributed development we are doing here

True, although this is stating the obvious - Cyan developed the game so that one creator and distributor would be sufficient. Maybe one day we'll have a way of fixing this sort of problem ourselves.