Complex GUI

[fcb]

I'm building a complex GUI for a PC connected electronic instrument.

There is realtime data being displayed (graphs), as well occacsionally updated image (graph backgrounds/historical data), user interactive buttons (essentially static) as well as fastmoving number displays, mouse sprite and several other sprites that are animated.

What I'm doing at the moment is generating the image background, buttons and historical data as an Image, then drawing live data on the screen live after bufferflipping. What I think I want to do is this:

Flipbuffer
Generate basic background black
Overlay basic (graph graticule) as either a sprite or some sort of alpha image.
Overlay historical graph data
Overlay live graph data
Overlay fastmoving numbers
Overlay mousesprite

Alot of the computationally intensive images I calculate only when changing.

So my question is, is it better (from a processing perspective) to create these overlayed images as giant (i.e. fullscreen) alphasprites and rebuild the screen each frame with just a handful of these, or is there a better way?

[Bitblazer]

The solution depends on the hardware, size and speed of RAM, CPU(s), GPU(s?) and obviously the manpower available to implement all this. Will it just be yourself? A longerm professionell solution may be better build on HTML5 based components, but that depends on the skillset of the involved developers and also on the amount of money available for the project. There are great commercial html5 based widget libraries for those kind of projects.

See for example List of widget toolkits or Perfect Widgets Express - there are many options.

[fcb]

Yeah.
HTML5 skills - zero
HTML5 budget - zero

[Bitblazer]

Free purebasic compatible solutions might include using walbus GFX_Wizard_BF.

[fcb]

Thanks. I'll have a look.