GUI Themes/TODO

We plan to implement a new GUI look & feel in ScummVM, roughly based on the new look of our web site. Some concept drafts of the new look can be found here: http://www.thekrest.de/wip/scummvm/

You can also read the documentation on the GUI Themes.

To Do

• List widget
  • get mock-up from Krest
  • Glitches when entering very long strings. The cursor overlaps the scrollbar. Possibly the scroll bar width should be automatically added to the right-side paddings, but I don't have the time to experiment with it right now.
• PopUp widget (aka drop-down list)
  • get mock-up from Krest
• Tab widget
  • tab widget is drawn completely wrong now
    • though it would be nice to leave current drawing style and select them via widget property
• Checkbox widget
  • smaller version of widget for 320xY resolution
• Dialogs
  • About dialog
    • looks bad. Probably add some shadows and text padding
    • fix glitch at the top of the dialog where part of the characters get stuck (see FIXME in about.cpp)
    • [Classic theme] Text seems to be drawn over the dialog frame. At least at the top of the dialog.
    • The grey text (color 2, kStateDisabled) is hard to read in both the new and the classic theme.
  • Options dialog
    • Maybe a "Theme path" setting? See bug #1502409
    • Maybe a "MIDI gain" setting? (Used by FluidSynth.) See patch #1336171
    • Current order of tabs is: Graphics, Audio, MIDI, Paths
      • Split Audio tab to Audio and Volume as in Edit game dialog
      • Make position of paths tab consistent with Edit game dialog
  • Edit game dialog
    • Current order of tabs is: Game, Paths, Gfx, Audio, Volume, MIDI
      • Rename Gfx tab to Graphics to be consistent with Options dialog
      • Make position of paths tab consistent with Options dialog
  • The sliding action of the debug console takes a lot more CPU now than it used to. On my 450 MHz P3, I don't even see it slide in 2x mode. It seems to appear/disappear all at once.
  • The text "Norwegian BokmÃ¥l" isn't rendered correctly since our fonts do not have the letter "Ã…". See bug #1276480
    • If we decide to use Latin-1 fonts instead, we should also update the About dialog to use accented characters where appropriate.

Some ideas about theme caching

Solution will look something like this:

 ./scummvm --gui-theme=classic  --create-gui-cache 320x200

you get classic-320x200.tcc file

 ./scummvm --gui-theme=classic  --create-gui-cache 320x240

you get classic-320x240.tcc file

Then concatenate the two and probably dump it into C array. Porters should do that by themselves for all resolutions supported by their platform. I.e. we have generic XxY theme, and all specific resolutions are derived from it.

tcc (theme cache) file format

This theme cache will be plainly a dump of all evaluated variables from HashMap. They will be loaded with loadAll() method in HashMap.

 'RESL', length, "320x200", number of vars, dumped vars

dumped vars are:

 "varname", int16 value,...

This format will let easily concatenate several generated theme cache files.

Probably there will be some optimisations in loadAll() method, which will malloc one big chunk of those vars, and since we have their keys as const char *, then it can alloc one big chunk for variables name as well and then pass pointers inside of it to respective members. Of course, that will be specially flagged as it will not be possible to free() any of those chunks deliberately.