Layout Management

For any UI application layout management is an absolute essential. In 3D game development I have yet to see any sort of layout management and though I can think of a few uses they are pretty few and far between. However, with the goals of Sgine to provide both a 3D UI as well as a full scenegraph infrastructure layout management is a very important thing.

What's particularly cool about layout management in Sgine is that it's not just for UI elements and it's not just for vertical and horizontal. That's right, you can use layout managers to lay out 3D objects in 3D space.

The layout management infrastructure is now in place, but still has a long way to go to provide a full set of advanced layout techniques. For now, here's a simple example laying out two Buttons:

package org.sgine.ui

import org.sgine.core.Direction

import org.sgine.render.StandardDisplay

import org.sgine.ui.layout.BoxLayout

object TestLayout extends StandardDisplay {
 def setup() = {
  val container = new LayoutContainer()
  container.layout := BoxLayout(Direction.Vertical, 10)
  container += new Button("Test Button 1")
  container += new Button("Test Button 2")
  scene += container
 }
}

What do you get for those five lines of logic? This:



You are not required to specify the layout as it will default to BoxLayout(Direction.Vertical, 0), but in order to show how easy configuring the layout function I decided to show a custom example. Custom layout functions can be provided that simply follow: Function1[NodeContainer, Unit].