DirectGui layout system

[Epihaius]

Thanks all for your feedback, guys !

@eldee

For DirectLabel I had troubles too, actually getBounds() return the object size once it is parented to another node which is already present in the scene (so aspect2d or any node already attached to it)

Hmmm, I just tried that, but e.g. detaching the widget and reparenting it to pixel2d doesn’t make a difference.

@eldee

I will definitively use it Well, once you’ve chosen a license

It has a license now, so you should be able to sleep better when using my code for your nefarious purposes .

@wolf

If your layout system would’ve been coded a bit more like standard DirectGui widgets, I could even imagine adding it as a custom feature to my DirectGui Designer.

Could you give me some examples of what exactly should be changed and how? It would certainly be cool to have an editor to create layouts as well !

@wolf

Maybe calling resetFrameSize before getting the bounds could help. It’s a function of the base class of every DirectGui widget.
Other than that, there are probably no other methods to get the real size except if you already have set a specific FrameSize. As a side note, there are convenient functions (which also use bounds though) to get the width, height and center of a widget which are called getWidth , getHeight and getCenter .

Tried all of that, to no avail sadly.

@wolf

Most DGui widgets inherit DirectFrame which most of the time is responsible for the text and background frame of the widget. The actual text then is a OnscreenText and has a separate background from the actual Frames background, which should actually be changed when the alignment changes. Now, resizing the Frame won’t update the Text as those are both separate elements. You need to tell the text that the frame has updated as otherwise the texts’ position won’t automatically be changed. I’m not entirely sure which function was responsible for resetting the text position, but you could try setText or also resetFrameSize .

Again, didn’t work unfortunately.
Do you have any idea how to get the actual OnscreenText or TextNode used by the DirectGui widget?

@Thaumaturge

Aside from what others have already said, I have an arcane method of my own design that does this job. (I forget what prompted me to make it.) I could share it, if you like.

That might be helpful, so I certainly wouldn’t mind checking it out, thanks !

@Thaumaturge

However, could you give me a short bit of example-code showing this issue with “getBounds”? A quick experiment with a DirectButton had it reporting bounds immediately after the button was constructed, and while I don’t know whether those bounds are correct, they seem reasonable.

Yes, they definitely seem reasonable enough, until I realized that these are actually the bounds of the text only! (At least, that’s what it seems like.)
There is however another method, widget.guiItem.getFrame, which returns the size of the frame only, so I could just combine these results to get the complete size.
In the hope of getting help from the Panda developers, I reported this issue in this separate topic which includes a code sample; if you run it, you should be able to see what I mean.

@Thaumaturge

I think that there’s a caveat here: changing the frame-size doesn’t actually affect where the button thinks its “left”, “right”, and “centre” are. Instead, it’s the other way around: the frame-size seems to be specified relative to the text-anchor.
…

Fair enough; thank you for the explanation !

This seems to be yet another issue that only the Panda devs will be able to straighten out, so I’ve reported it in this new topic also.