Ancient Spaces Blog

So,

The GUI we use for the editor is wxWidgets, a fairly comprehensive GUI library, which is designed to operate as natively on a platform as possible. This means lots of generic Windows XP style menu bars, and grey slightly sort of almost 3D-ish buttons. In order to make the application slightly more usable, we also are using wxAUI, a 3rd party addition to wxWidgets which adds dockable windows and tool bars to the system. wxWidgets is nice in that it allows for fairly simple creation of customized panels, with layouts of buttons and lists of data. The overall look of the program is only a nice the look of the operating system (I am not a fan of the default Windows XP skin)). It does seem to be the best open source tool out there for constructing our interface.

There are however some problems with widgets. The event handling systems relies on lots and lots of enumerated values and macros, which means giant lists of button and menu option configurations. And I've found that not all events behave the way one would expect. My largest concern related to this is selection in the Scene Editor window. This window contains a wxTreeControl, which looks much like a small window for browsing directories, but in this case allows users to edit the scene. Selection on this window should mirror the scene, and visa versa. The events triggered by changing the selection in the window have proven to be extremely unpredictable, sometimes triggering multiple selection events, sometimes not triggering any. This results in selection on the window having no effect in the rest of the editor. Although this and similar issues do not cause program crashes, they may prove to be bugs that reside in the software until the are fixed in wxWidgets.

-Simon
Chief GUI Officer