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OpenGL Widget Set Recommendations?
"GLUI provides a flexible windowing system and a rich selection of widgets (buttons, checkboxes, radio button sets, spinners, text boxes, arcballs, dividers, packing panels, packing columns, etc.). GLUI's design is very straightforward, and the docs and examples are extremely well done. GLUI is highly portable, since it depends only on OpenGL and Glut.
GLOW is 'a cross-platform object-oriented framework for building interactive applications using OpenGL or similar APIs such as Mesa.' GLOW is basically an elegant C++ wrapper around Glut, providing push buttons, check boxes, radio buttons, scroll bars, sliders, text fields, menus, etc. This is a really nice description of GLOW, including comparisons to GLUI and MUI.
Speaking of MUI, Steve Baker's advice is basically 'just don't.' Instead, Steve recommends PUI, which he wrote. :) Actually, he speaks very highly of GLUI, and does a nice job of pointing out the subtle differences between GLUI and PUI.
PUI is part of PLIB, a rich and vibrant set of libraries for cross-platform game development. This is a wonderful intro to PUI. Go read it right now. Really. PUI itself does all the sorts of stuff I'm looking for, and perhaps more. It looks to be very stable and mature, too.
LibUFO is a C++ widget set for OpenGL, currently in alpha. Features include pluggable look and feel, theme support, and layout manager support. LibUFO can be used with GLUT, SDL or any native GL context, so it is highly portable, too. Except for the fact that this is only alpha code at this point, it looks quite nice.
FOX is a C++ toolkit for developing cross-platform GUI apps. It seems like a fairly standard C++ framework, with built-in OpenGL widgets, too. By all accounts, FOX is quite mature and stable, with a fairly active developer base. FOX supports many OSes, but not, unfortunately, the Mac. And yes, I could easily hack out Mac support myself, but I don't want to do that-- I want to write my app.
FLTK is another cross-platform C++ GUI toolkit with OpenGL support. The advantage of FLTK over FOX is that FLTK supports MacOS X (not 9.x and earlier-- too bad).
DirectFB is a library built on top of a framebuffer device such as the Linux framebuffer or SDL. There seems to be some 3D support in there via DirectFBGL, though the docs say that there is no hardware acceleration support (i.e. Mesa vs OpenGL). The thing that makes DirectFB particularly attractive is the fact that Gtk/Gdk has been ported to it.
SDL and ParaGUI are also an attractive option. SDL is insanely portable, and ParaGUI is a wonderful GUI/widget toolkit that runs on top of SDL. You really need to see the ParaGUI demos running to appreciate how slick it is. The screenshots are nice and all, but they don't do it justice. As well, ParaGUI is really slick in its support for themes, XML, and Python.
PicoGUI was a recent SlashDotting victim. As mentioned at that time, PicoGUI is actually a sophisticated client-server framework, capable of running in a wide variety of environments, including on top of OpenGL. There is plenty of info at the PicoGUI FAQ, including a few comments that suggest it would be a perfectly reasonable choice for what I'm looking at doing. Given the scope of what PicoGUI is trying to achieve, I'm a little nervous that it might be overkill for what I want to do.
Fresco is another client-server framework which some may have previously known as Berlin. Fresco seems very cool, but again, I suspect it is overkill for what I'm doing.
The GUI Toolkit/Framework Page is also an excellent resource for cross-platform development of all stripes.
And the OpenGL Toolkit FAQ is also an excellent resource with special emphasis on OpenGL."
I'd throw out an additional requirement for an ideal OpenGL GUI library, one that's lead me to start developing my own (It'll be open source when done.)
:) (Wish that code was cleaner...)
It'd be nice if a cross-platform widget/GUI library existed that would allow me to place the GUI's into the environment, by rendering to textures or virtual GUI planes, instead of just as yet another 2d desktop library. Its not TOO much additional work if done from the beginning...
Think of the fun you could have w/ full GUI support in the environment. A 3d embeddable Gecko control, anyone?
For your GUI, take a look at GNUstep. It supports Linux, the BSDs, Solaris and Windows and is (pretty much) compatible with Cocoa.
For your 3D graphic stuff, take a look at the GNU 3DKit.
I would recommend against using widget sets with OpenGL as a graphics layer unless you really need it: OpenGL is less than ideal for that purpose.
Be careful about threading in wxWindows. About 6 months back I had to write a program using wxWindows and the threading gave me some problems.Most of those libraries are being improved AFAIK
Also worry about memory leaks. I am not sure If the code I wrote was leaking it or whether it was wxWindows, but hte programs did leak gallons of memory.
Not that I am an authority on wxWindows, or that it is a bad library, just a warning. Maybe some other readers have had experiences?
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
You definitely forgot Qt. The only downside is that it's commercial on Win32 (unless you're running MSVC6), apart from that it does its job very well, and has a very reasonable OpenGL widget.
As for wxWindows (which others have suggested), I tried it some time ago and I think it truly sucked. Hopefully it has improved since then :-)
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
Of course, from a technological angle, cross-platform widgets (we'll call them CPW from now on) are an elegant solution. Design your UI once, and you're done. This seem like A Good Thing.
The problem with CPW is that it gives more time to the user to adapt to your widgets. Of course, one can argue that once you can use the widgets in one environment, you can use them everywhere. That is true. The problem is that not all your users are as good with computers as you are, and it may put an extra strain on the user to learn between the basics of your system and the host OS. How do you drag and drop? How do you move around windows? What happens when you double click on the top? Does it maximise? Does it roll up just to show the title bar?
Take a clue from the major players in the industry. From what I've heard, Adobe updated PhotoShop to give it the Mac OS X look and feel by using it's native widgets. Many companies are now making wrappers around existing library calls, instead of making widgets. That way you have a unified API for all your supported platforms to design your UI on, but also have the advantage of keeping the usual behaviour and look and feel of an application.
Sadly, I don't know of any public library that accomplishes this. But I'm sure that if you looked around enough, you should be able to find a few.
Good luck!
You might want to take a look at Togl
It's a Tcl/Tk widget, it's pretty friendly and cross platform. There are a couple of 3D modellers using Togl. One of them is called Ayam3d (it's kind of like Maya but not, it's also open source). AC3D is the other modeller I know using Togl, and it's shareware.
M0571y H@rml355.
Do you want a GUI toolkit that will let you put windows and dialog boxes and such inside your GL render context, or... Do you want a GUI toolkit that will draw windows and dialog boxes and such on the destop, and which includes support for windows that host GL render contexts?
Build stuff. Stuff that walks, stuff that rolls, whatever.
I have done some OpenGL work with GTK+.
GTK+ does not support OpenGL out of the box, so to speak, but you can get a package called gtkglarea which adds an OpenGL widget.
If you use GTK+ v1.2, then gtkglarea v1.2.x packages are easy to find and come with many distros (e.g. Redhat).
However, I would recommend that you use GTK+ 2.x, since you are coding a new application, and GTK+ 2.x is much improved. There is no *official* version of gtkglarea for GTK+ 2.0 though. HOWEVER, you can get gtkglarea v1.99.0. Look on developer.gnome.org. I think.
Links:
Gnome ftp site
Gnome ftp mirror
GTK+'s main advantages are its maturity, its solid design, and its comprehensive selection of widgets. If your application is going to reach an appreciable size, then you will want a good widget set like GTK+.
As a C++ programmer, I find GTK+'s reliance on vanilla C to be a little irritating, however, you can gtk GTK-- which is a C++ wrapper for it. I prefer to use GTK+ directly though, so I interface my C++ code with GTK+ by using static member functions for callbacks.
Hope that helps
Mr. Meanie
For my scientific visualization project, I use Qt and its QGLWidget for OpenGL vis. It features nice communication to other widgets, easy mouse event interception, and you can share display lists across multiple views. If you intend your app to be free, then they cost you nothing. I have used wxWindows and GTK before, and Qt is vastly superior in my opinion.
No mentions of this combination yet, so I thought I'd drop one. If you want cross-platform compatibility, Java is the best way to go. Java 3d has a really good OGL set up as a Scene Graph API. Mix in AWT or Swing, and you've essentially got yourself an entire cross-platform system already set up.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson