void OnGUI() {
if (GUI.Button(myRect, "ClickMe")) {
:
}
}
This allows for super clean code as GUI objects don't exist outside of the OnGUI event.
Contrast that with a standard approach -- where you would need to place code in at least four separate places:
define the button as a class member
initialise it in the constructor
handle user interaction
position it in the refresh event
The Unity style is excellent for rapid prototyping.
I'm not quite sure how it is implemented internally. I think that OnGUI executes once per frame in order to render, and also any mouse or keyboard event also invokes it.
Has anyone considered doing something similar with JUCE?
In Unity I was able to create my own persistent settings variables.
Something like:
class PrefsBool {
bool value;
public:
PrefsBool(string key, bool valueIfNoneFound) {
// load from prefs file
}
void setValue(bool v) {
value = v;
//!!! save to prefs file
}
void render(Rect R, string text) {
if( GUI.Toggle(R,text) != value )
setValue(!value);
}
}
... so then my settings code could just do something like this:
class settings : Component {
PrefsBool isPortrait("isPortrait", false);
:
void OnGUI() {
:
isPortrait.render(someRect, "Check for portrait mode");
}
:
void someMethod() {
if (isPortrait.didChangeValue()) {
print( isPortrait.getValue() );
// ^ or just `isPortrait` & write a custom bool type conversion in prefsBool
didChangeValue() would return true if the value had changed since the last time it was called.
With suitable type conversions, I could use these variables as simple bools floats etc. But every time their value is set they would save to file. And .render(...) could be invoked on them to position a GUI control that would let the user change the value.
This was for highly experimental work; it gave a decent plastic workflow.
Just posting in case anyone has any interesting angles on GUI dev.
I've been working with React Native and Redux. Its quite a new way for me to work with UI development. Redux allows you to keep a global state which represents all the data in your application. You cannot mutate the state. Each state change is a new state. The makes things very predictable, and allows things like stepping back in time. React Native makes it possible to listen to that state and re-render the UI when necessary, with an XML-like abstraction called JSX for declaring layouts, and flexbox type stylesheets. And, love it or hate it, its all in javascript! Although I must say ES6/ES7 makes it better.