[PLUGIN] GWEN - GUI system aimed at games

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<font size="4">GUI system aimed at games</font>

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What is GWEN?

GWEN is a collection of easy to use widgets for use in easily designing graphical user interfaces for either games or applications. It can be fully skinned, it performs well, and it has many more options than the vanilla alternatives.

Why do I need GWEN over Construct's normal interface options?

Construct offers a lot of objects designed to help you make a game, but it doesn't quite cut it for many situations. Many of the objects, like list boxes, or edit boxes, or combo boxes, cannot be hidden or destroyed in Construct. They all look exactly the same, because they are based on the Windows API, and for the same reason, they all behave exactly the same and have the same bugs.

A quick example of this - make a list box in vanilla Construct. Now try to hide it, or make it transparent. Your only option is to move it off screen, which is not an ideal solution. GWEN uses Construct's innate rendering capabilities, not Windows. It is much more flexible because of this.

GWEN's widgets are all created at runtime directly on the event sheet, where they can be organized into groups and collapsed. This means they won't be cluttering up your layout in the editor. You can have hundreds of buttons and still easily navigate around in your layout. This doesn't mean GWEN is difficult to use - I have designed GWEN to be as easy to use as possible. You can crank out a professional interface in minutes.

Tired of counting pixels and calculating percentages? GWEN can do all the measuring for you, meaning absolute coordinates aren't necessary - widgets can be docked, ordered, and aligned based on relative positions rather than absolute coordinates, taking a lot of math off your shoulders and giving you flexibility. This means that if a window is resized, or a resolution is changed, it's no longer your problem. You don't have to shuffle the interface around, GWEN will do that for you.

Lastly, GWEN has a lot more interface widgets than Construct. Some examples are context menus, toolbar ribbons, tree lists, rpg inventory screens, and tooltips. There's more, but listing them all would take up half the page, instead, just check out the free demo!

These are only a few of the many benefits, but it gives you an idea of how massive GWEN is and how much it can help you. I personally use it in my current projects.

I need video evidence.

I currently have two good videos, I'm working on many more.

Teaser Two

I would like to try GWEN for free.

There is a free demo available, it is not time limited, and it is just as powerful as the full version, but it has a DEMO watermark on it. This should let you play with the plugin as long as you like without purchasing it. It comes with a fully commented example cap.

Download the GWEN Demo HERE!

This is pretty awesome! Where do I get the full version?

The full version of GWEN is $9.99.

Buy GWEN HERE!

What's the license look like?

Basically, you can release whatever you want with the demo version. With the retail ($9.99) version, you can release independent games. I classify independent as free games, or games that gross under $3500 income. If you get lucky enough to make it to that point, I'll ask for $90 for the super duper commercial unlimited license. I don't have the legal power to enforce this license, but I struggle to make enough cash to eat, and I work at Walmart every night, so shame on you.

GridTree and Noise were free, why are you charging for GWEN?

GWEN's complexity, enormity, usefulness, and sheer awesomeness put it leagues ahead of my previous plugins. I released those with an optional donation option, and it didn't work out so well. GWEN took a long time to develop, and I put a lot of care into it. My financial situation isn't so great - I work at Walmart every night and develop in my spare time, so I am inclined to sell it. I apologize for the inconvenience, but trust me - it'll be worth your while, and I will support the plugin post release until it's as bug free as I can make it. All future updates will be free.

I'm confused!

Luckily for you, I am working on an array of Youtube videos outlining every aspect of GWEN from how to install it to how docking a widget works. Unfortunately, they aren't quite ready yet! This space is reserved for links to them as I complete them.

I found a bug.

These are the currently known issues:

• GWEN looks weird, ugly, or different from the screenshots. - If GWEN cannot find a valid skin, it will default to using basic colors. Make sure that you have your skin property pointing at a valid skin.
• Button behaves oddly when mode is not set. - Known issue.
• Property List incomplete - Working on this.

Did you find something that isn't on this list? It's much easier to get my attention via private message, so PM me the details, and I'll fold a fix into the next update. Thanks for your help!

It is really done? Awesome work on this Arsonide! One hell of an incredibly useful plugin that is totally worth the money. Planning on using GWEN to make my level editor so much more comfortable to use.

I'll be getting the full version as soon as it's in the budget, thank you for this!

OMG! Be still and take my money!!!111one

:D

One question before I hit the buy-button: Do you ship the plugin with some sort of documentation of it`s functions?

Arsonide it seems to be really complex and feature reach! :)

I also met the importance of a great GUI system. Now I have ad-hoc buttons, menus, badges, but it is not a good way in longterm...

It would be great to see some of your games, that uses this plugin already, so we can have an idea in minutes, how can use it in own games/apps!

Well, there is this demo Arsonide releasedhttp://dl.dropbox.com/u/1032313/GWEN_DEMO.zip which incoorperates many of the plugin's features, but yet not all. Especially the inventory functions would be very nice to understand ;)

I have a few errands to run, but I will make an inventory example tonight, and I'll make that my first video. The basic process is you make an inventory panel, then you create an inventory object as a child. You set the size of each square on the inventory, then you set image panel objects as children on the inventory object. They will automatically snap to a grid when parented to an inventory object. They will also never overlap each other. They fire a condition if you try to drop an object on another object.

There's an expression on the inventory object that will let you see if the inventory has any space, and another expression that tells you where the first available space is.

Each object in the inventory is an image panel. Image panels are kind of like sprites but instead of Construct handling them, GWEN handles them. They are GUI objects that can be docked and so forth. They have a load from external image action, and more importantly, a set UV action. Set UV means you can load a giant image with all your inventory object art on it, like this, and then make image panels with that image. Set UV will let you select which object you want the image to represent. This saves a lot of memory in the long run. Like I said, I created each widget thinking about long term implications.

Another example of that is that each and every widget has a "set data" action and a "get data" expression. "Data" can be anything you want, a string, integer, float, whatever. The cool thing is that you can use set data on all of the image panels to set statistics for the object that it represents. (It's name, damage, etc.) Set and Get Data are found in the common widget options, since they affect all widgets.

I will have the example cap and Youtube video for all this functionality ready tonight.

Fail , Your plugin does not work.i installed the gwendemo plugins and when i try to run your example cap construct still asks for the plugin.im using construct r2.

Correction Fail = me being technically challenged again (aka dumbass).My directories changed with one off my hd's.

I tested the demo before release, and tested it once again just now after clearing out all my plugins to default state. Are you sure you installed it correctly?

Do you have more than one instance of Construct installed? If so are you sure you both extracted to Construct RC2's directory, and that you are opening the example CAP in Construct RC2?

EDIT: Oh okay great! I hope you enjoy it.

very nice plugin indeed, i will buy it at the end off the month.(want to see if the exchange rates go down first lol).

Is this the new version of that xml reader?

Is this the new version of that xml reader?

No this is GWEN.

Tonight I'm dropping the price by half.

I've been getting a lot of views, showing me that there is interest, but so far only one purchase over the course of a week, and while the profit would be nice, seeing my plugin proliferate and actually being used would be much nicer for me as a developer. This will, however, be the only price drop.

EDIT: I have updated the price.

Ah, that was a tad too quick as I would have paid the 10 bucks right away ;)

Anyway, just purchased it and will give it an elaborate run later on. The first thing that popped up when I played around with it was that it looks like a window container cannot hold more than 4 tab controls. Am I doing something wrong?

[EDIT]

Forgive me my stupidity, as I have only copied the event without crosschecking its internal values. After I did that, I found the TAB name & PAGE name values, altered them accordingly and everything was fine :)

Cheers,

The Colonel

Bought it a few days ago, but just logged in to say thanks for making this, Arsonide.

Looks like I ran into some trouble with this. It's the default example cap untampered with other than changing the font from Times to Verdana, although it didn't appear right to begin with.

<img src="http://i.imgur.com/ephhw.png" border="0" />

Am I overlooking something? The widgets appear either clipped in a wrong way or straight out missing and many text elements have very unfitting colors.