I need help with fonts and GUI!

OpenGL Development JOGL Development
#1

I have many questions so please be patient. Thanks. :smiley:

I am fairly new to OpenGL, I’ve been working with it for a few months now. I’ve done a few things here and there, made a simple model format that I like etc.

I can already display text, so don’t worry that is not the problem.

As far as GUI’s are concerened I think I have an idea of what is usually going on, but I need lots of help.

  1. I have a program where I want to display text that follows objects around or acts as a label for objects on a mouse over. For example, labels for characters or items etc. Would some one be so kind as to explain how I would go about doing something like this.

  2. In same program I have a simple FPS counter for development purposes. I’ve noticed that the text looks fine on the development computer, however if I were to move it to another computer, the font will change size and position on me. Seeing as how this effect is undesirable :D, I wondered if anyone could explain how to fix this problem.

  3. I am really disappointed with the fact that there are only about 6 fonts that I can use. I wouldn’t mind being able to create my own fonts. Is there a better way to go about displaying text on screen than the meathod provided by JOGL? One meathod that intrigued me was placing a texture of a character on a polygon. If someone has more information on fonts or could point me in to information I would really appreciate it.

  4. Also how would I go about creating a GUI? I was thinking about creating textured quads for panels and buttons etc, using ray casting to detect the quad when the mouse moved over it. Etc. If anyone would be so kind as to point me in the right direction I’d be greatful.

  5. Finally I was wondering, someone mentioned that Xith3D uses Swing somehow. Is there a way to render a Swing component in JOGL and if so could someone provide me with an example?

Thanks very much for any help! I really appreciate it. :smiley:

#2

*** bump ***

I hope this doen’t mean it is something extremly difficult to do in JOGL. I’ve been looking around in OpenGL C++ examples and it seems they use other libraries to supplement OpenGL, things which will draw out a GUI.

Is there a GUI that I could try to port? From LWJGL or something like that?

#3

As you seem to know, you could take a look at how Xith3D does it, or if you want to get into porting another library, google for glui, which is a gui that uses opengl for rendering. Theres also a gui is the spgl, but I’m not sure what state its in at the moment, as I’ve not looked at it for a while.

#4

Thanks, I’ve already thought about checking out Xith3D source, but I’ll check out the other two libraries you mentioned.