hello, i have been browsing around looking at lots of different gaming tutorials and such with openGL but for one of my classes i am required to make a graphical user interface instead of a gaming engine. is there any special libraries anyone can mention or if anyone know of some good tutorials to do so i would greatly appriciate it. i was pretty sure i would need GLUT to read in information but if there is a better way you guys can think of please let me know. im just getting started and would like to take the best route possible.
Not a lot of tuts for homegrown GUIs.
Yes you need to track input, GLUT is one way, another would be using the native windowing interface.
OTOH it depends what you mean by GUI.
If you have to write your own widgets, or use an existing library of widgets to just build an interface.
There’s lots of libs you could use. Looke for FLTK for an exampel of an OpenGL native widgets set. It’ll do all your mouse handling etc. You just handle the callbacks (like most widgets sets).
[This message has been edited by dorbie (edited 01-29-2004).]
I don’t know if it’s still around, but GLUI is a pretty good one. There are implementations for various Operating Systems. I’ve used it in the past, very similar to TCL/TK. Simplistic, but it gets the job done.
This is an interesting question to me. I’m curently trying to create a GUI in OpenGL too. Here’s what I’ve figgured out so far:
Draw your 3d view first, then switch to orthographic and draw your 2D GUI elements on top of that. You can then use things like “glRect” to make buttons and panels with. Handleing mouse input is the same for any other GL object. Other then that, it’s just a matter of making a big switch that sorts distributes the mouse clicks to the proper functions.
Hope that helps.
-=GB=-