Re: [pygame] Minimal GUI support

[Magnus Lie Hetland <magnus@hetland.org>]

Arturo Espinosa Aldama <arturo@ximian.com>:
>
> On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Magnus Lie Hetland wrote:
> 
> > I've been thinking about some small supporting tool for writing
> > GUI-like code in PyGame -- especially adding "widgets" to plain PyGame
> > applications (e.g. games), such as the buttons in SolarWolf etc.
> >
> > What I came up with was the FocusGroup (pardon the pun ;)
> >
> > Basically, it's a Group (I inherited RenderUpdates; perhaps I should inherit
> > Group instead, and use it as a mixin?) which can manage links between its
> > members, where each link has a test connected to it. This test is used to see
> > whether a specific event warrants a focus change along that link. The elements
> > should be sprites which implement the methods focus(), blur() and handle(). The
> > code is quite simple (and I'm sure there is plenty of room for improvement):
> 
> I don't know what to think about this. I think pygame should stay quite
> basic and minimal, just as SDL is. Widgets are such a complicated code
> base that I would consider creating a new project.
 
That was the idea... I never meant to include it in the package
itself. I was talking about contributing it to the repository :)

(On the other hand, a simple group with support for "focus" wouldn't
be a bad thing to have in the package either... But, as I said, that
wasn't my original intention.)

> Another thing is that if I did a game myself, I would want to make my own
> set of widgets: games are extremely loose when it comes to this, and
> that's part of the fun and the art: to program an application with no
> boundaries and GUI guidelines, and let creativity render new and
> revolutionary proposals. Just look at what modern GUIs are today: they
> really seem to have taken some ideas from the gaming scene.

Sure.

> So, I advice you to work on a set of abstract classes that will save us
> programmers from the typical boilerplate (like focus groups, events and
> windows), but let none of that depend on any actual screen rendering, so
> we can go ahead and do our own magic.

Indeed. As you can see from the code, everything is abstract; no
widgets whatsoever. That was the idea.

> Greetings,
> Arturo

--
Magnus Lie Hetland                                  The Anygui Project
http://hetland.org                                  http://anygui.org
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