OidaUI is a graphical user interface library built on top of OpenGL for use in Linux, Windows, iOS, and Android operating systems running i386, amd64, and arm architectures. Other mixes of operating systems and architectures may also work, but those are just the targeted ones… the principle is if you can get a OpenGL context running, you can run OidaUI on it.
OidaUI is designed to augment your software’s UI capabilities while remaining an isolated from the rest of your enviroment. This means you can expect OidaUI to only lightly influence to your software’s design at the expense of being more complicated to use. To compensate for this, much care is put into the manual when possible.
At its core, OidaUI is a shared library that exports standard C symbols. Although OidaUI is built with C++, we choose to export only C symbols for maximum portability. Plus, the fewer exported symbols, the better.
OidaUI utilizes hardware acceleration for many of its processes when it can.
When you’ve selected an OpenGL context to utilize OidaUI, that context is known as “The Canvas”.
OidaUI’s design is close to that of HTML, each UI item (textbox, button, label, image, ect) is known as an “element”.
Depending on the type of element, elements can or can’t contain other elements.
All elements have a size in width and height. A given element will dictate its own min/max width and height. But the element’s parent will ultimately dictate the computed width and height so long that it remains in the min/max bounds.
A parent’s bounding box will always be equal or greater than the sum of the area of its children’s. (This is a big difference when compared to how HTML is rendered, where in HTML you can have things that render outside the bounding box of their parent.)
Each element does have a z-position. This is the same as z-index in terms of HTML. The default behaviour is the parent’s z-pos plus one.
Debian is the perferred platform for developing OidaUI on. So going forward it is assumed you are running Debian or similar.
libglm-dev(0.9.9.8)libfreetype-dev(2.11.1)libglfw3-dev(3.3.6) - optional, needed for some testslibgl-dev(1.4.0)
The main product of this repository is liboidaui.so which can be
done by running:
- TODO
You can also execute unit tests: TODO
And, to build example applications: TODO
OidaUI is designed to be completely agnostic of your windowing system, as well as hardware and OS. OidaUI only cares that whatever its running on is using OpenGL. You are responsible for attaching the window to a GL context (such as through GLFW, EGL, ect). And after that OidaUI can take over. This is in contrast to other UI libraries:
- OidaUI will NOT open other windows for you
- OidaUI will NOT interact with the file system for you
- OidaUI will only interact with the graphics driver, no other hardware
I have chose to use OpenGL instead of Vulkan promote portability, but also we do not need the power vulkan can provided to build a GUI library. But, sometime in the future I hope to have this library work with both APIs
Apple has recently made its OpenGL implementation deprecated in an attempt to make its operating system less useful, I guess. So I’ll be suspending iOS support. You’re welcome to make your own ports via MoltenGL/VK or something, but overall I would advise you to just not to develop for Apple products and tell your customers that Apple products fail to support the modern engineering required to run your technology.
OidaUI renders on orthographic projection matrix. The pixel at (0,0) will always be in the top left. Each element will have a bounding box that is placed on a pixel and width and height will be measured in pixels as well. Whatever happens inside of the bounding box depends on the element.
Each commit on master will be a line item on the change log, with the first line of each commit message being the most visible aspect. A tagged commit denotes a release of sorts.
When I start a large project like this, I like to list out what products/projects/people influence my decisions in designing this thing. So check these people out and the work they do, if you like this project you’ll like theirs and vice versa.