I've spent a lot of time looking at different GUI frameworks, for various platforms and various languages, and one thing rubs me pretty sore.. They cover some basic widgets/controls/gadgets/whateveryouwanttocallthem just fine for the most part.. But even slightly enhanced, popular deviations are left out in the cold..
As one example... A lot of applications I have used in the past, or still use, can do fancy things like multi-colored foreground/background with Text, etc.. Yet everywhere I go on the web I come across nothing but walls and walls of Articles/Code on what is apparently the only way to get this type of functionality:
Building a custom control / extending a base class. (worse yet most of it is in C/C++ which I can barely parse)
This really seems absurd to me.. I've seen examples of just getting the text to change color in a RichEditBox and it seems annoyingly complex and unnecessary if Framework developers would just wake up and make some more useful widgets (Hello Microsoft/GTK/Wx ?)
The truth is I am frustrated with being a beginner I suppose.. I just want to build a nice clean Interface for the TextRPG I want to do - but I can't even get a simple Window capable of displaying text 1 character at a time, in any combination of color/style/font that I might be able to think up.
Yes, I know I could just use a console - But I don't want a console application.. I'd like something slightly more modern / appealing to potential players. A familiar Windowed GUI.
I could open a screen on the GUI.. But it's not quite the same and I'd have to really code all the functionality by hand. Arguably doable with my experience, but would probably take just as long as trying to modify a RichEdit Control, and frustrate me to no end...
WebGadget - out of the question. Sorry. Just-won't-work for what I want to do.
Scintilla - hopeful, but somewhat contrived solution.. Plus I already need to write a lexer for my command parser, why would I want to write one to color text as well?
It would be nice to have a simple control to do this stuff, even web browsers can get it done these days! lol...
A glorified example a monkey could use, sans all the messy code required to actually do it
Code: Select all
TextAppendColored("Well, that was easy!", "red")
;// Or something slightly better, color Tag parsing
TextAppendColored("{blue}Well, {brown}that was {red}e{green}a{pink}s{blue}y{yellow}!")
Thanks for listening.. If anyone does have a magical solution I'd be interested in hearing it."Well, that was easy!"
"Well, that was easy!"
Hell.. if anyone wants to build a magical solution that works too.. But I ask you guys for too much already.