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Pie Noon
An open source project by
FPL.
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Pie Noon
An open source project by
FPL.
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This document outlines the GUI components used to construct the menus in Pie Noon.
The GUI menu system is designed to provide an easy way to author data-driven menus that automatically handle input from both touch devices and gamepads.
Basic input is provided by the Input system (input.h/cpp). This provides access to raw input data such as key presses, joystick/gamepad movements, and mouse/pointer touch events.
The system is built upon the TouchscreenButton class, (touchscreenbutton.cpp/h) which represents an onscreen button which responds to touch events and can easily be queried to learn if it has been pushed recently. Each item in the menu is a TouchscreenButton.
TouchscreenButtons can be used independently, but most collections of buttons in the game are written using GuiMenus, (gui_menu.cpp/.h) which are organizations of TouchscreenButtons, along with whatever static images are necessary to render the menu on screen.
The GuiMenu class takes care of updating and maintaining the TouchScreenButtons, as well as tracking the menu focus and handling movement and selection from gamepads/keyboards and other non-touch sources.
Each TouchscreenButton represents a single button on-screen. As long as something calls its AdvanceFrame() member function every frame, it will keep itself up to date, and track touch events. It can be queried via the button() member function, which returns an input button object, (a standard object in the input library, for tracking input states via is_down(), went_down(), and went_up().) This is used to check both the current state of the button, as well as any changes that have taken place since the last update.
All of the details for each button are read in from a Flatbuffer data object, button_def. (Located in common.fbs/json) This describes both the look of the button, (textures and offests to use when rendering the button when up/down), the screen-area that the button registers touches in, and a unique button ID.
The GuiMenu object represents a menu that the player can navigate using their keyboard or a gamepad. It maintains a list of active buttons that are part of the menu, handles transitions between them, and registers events if a menu item is selected via gamepad, or clicked with a touch device.
Any time a button is pressed the GuiMenu records this as an event, and stores it in a queue. The game can request the oldest unhandled menu selection event via the GetRecentSelection() funtion, and handle them accordingly. (Events are returned as a structure containing the ID of the button that was pressed, and the ID of the controller that completed the action.)
Much like TouchscreenButtons, GuiMenus are described by a Flatbuffer data object, which lists all of the buttons in the current menu, as well as things like whether the buttons should respond to controller input or be touch only or which button should start out selected.
The game maintains one GuiObject, which simply loads up different menus when called for.
GuiMenus also contain static images - other art necessary for rendering the menu, but that is not interactive. Like other parts of the menu, static images are also loaded from the Flatbuffer configuration file. Structurally, they are effectively buttons, stripped of most of their interactivity.
The GuiMenu allows for several possible states the buttons can be in at any given time. These states are tracked on the buttons, but largely only make sense in the context of the menu itself.
The focus is the button that is currently "selected" in the menu. It a gamepad user were to push the A button, whatever button currently has focus would trigger. Only one button can have focus at a time, and this is tracked by the menu itself. The game can check the current focus via the GetFocus() method.
When a button has focus, it will automatically animate and pulse.
When buttons are set to be disabled, they are greyed out, and cannot be selected. They can still receive focus, but if the user tries to select them, instead of a normal event being sent, they send an event of type kInvalidInput.
Buttons are normally visible, but this can be changed. If a button's visibility is set to false, then the button does not render on screen, and cannot receive focus or be selected.
