Say I'm writing a 2D cad program of some sort, and I want to be able to zoom in and scroll around my document. However, I also want full control over how my document is drawn and I want an OpenGL context for which to do the drawing. How do I do this? Should I subclass NSScrollView and do something I can't quite figure out there? Should I subclass NSOpenGLView and add a pair of NSScrollers and figure out how to draw them properly? Making NSScrollers and drawing them in a way that looks good natively looks nontrivial, but NSScrollViews seem to want to own all the content you might be scrolling, rather than letting me control the size of the knob of the scroll bar and other such things. I'd be completely content with giving a document size in pixels or some such, just the most important thing to me is that when I draw to (0,0) in my OpenGL context, I draw to the corner of the window, and not into some buffer that NSScrollView owns.
Should I subclass NSOpenGLView and add a pair of NSScrollers
Yes, since scrolling a OpenGL view doesn't make sense. You want to adjust the viewing volume (i.e. the parameters defining the projection matrix), rather than moving your viewport around. And that only works if you have manual control over the scroll bars.
Related
I'm trying to draw a large waveform/graph that is an NSView placed inside of a NSScrollView. That way, the user can scroll horizontally and parts of it at a time.
The waveform view can be very large (technically, infinitely wide).
If the entire waveform is drawn, the scrolling performance is unusable. I'm unsure why NSScrollView is attempting to redraw the entire view rather than just the visible rect - but I suspect I will need to implement this logic myself.
What is the most efficient way to implement this to have a good scrolling experience?
You could tile the contents of your scroll view into several small NSView instances, each one representing a small part of your graph and placed right beside one another.
However, I am not sure to what extent the views that are clipped off-screen still consume resources and affect performance.
A better apporach would be similar to the above, but relying on the built-in functionality of a Collection View. Its machinery definitely takes care of displaying only the cells that should be visible (not clipped by the scroll view).
I have a custom NSView that draws (with -drawRect) a graph. It also tracks the mouse position (with -mouseMoved and the like) and draws the cursor position/coordinates relative to the axes.
The graph is big and (potentially) slow to draw, and doesn't depend on the mouse position. The mouse-over effect is tiny, and always fast to draw. I don't want to have to redraw everything when the mouse moves a couple pixels, because it feels sluggish.
I'm sure I can make my own private graphics context (doubled in size, if on a 2x display), draw the chart data into that once, and then have -drawRect simply blit that into the view's drawing context. Alternatively, I could split my NSView subclass into two classes, and have one just the chart data, and one just the overlay, and place them exactly on top of each other (though they have to share a bit of data, so this seems awkward).
Is there a built-in method to make this easier, or is there a more idiomatic way of handling this?
Take a look at these NSWindow methods:
Bracketing Drawing Operations
– cacheImageInRect:
– restoreCachedImage
– discardCachedImage
Normally, with a view, you define a drawRect: method that draws contents on-demand. You can, however, do on the spot drawing in a view as result of events for example, by locking focus on the view, performing the drawing, then unlocking focus. The missing link in this on-the-spot drawing, is somehow undoing it without calling your potentially heavy drawRect: via setNeedsDisplay:
This is where the Bracketed drawing operations on NSWindow come into play. Before locking focus on the view and doing some on-the-spot drawing, cache an image of the view in the area you intend to draw. When you next want to update your drawing (while tracking events, perhaps) then restore the cached image, rinse, and repeat.
I am making a GUI in OpenGL (more specifically lwjgl). I have tried hard to research different ways of doing this but I am having a hard time finding exactly what I want. I do not want to use any external libraries (only ones built in OpenGL, even trying to stay away from using GLUT) and I would like to have it work on anything that supports OpenGL (ex. Frame Buffer Objects don't work on older graphic cards).
I am making a 3D GUI with a scrollable panel as a component. The problem is I don't know how to draw a partial GUI component without doing a lot of calculations to only render part of it. I am making the components out of OpenGL primitives, not textures. I was hoping there is an easy way to do this like use multiple viewports. I don't really even understand what viewports are.
In short: I need to have a scrollable panel as a component overlapping other GUI components (since it will be a drop down menu) and not let any of the components in my panel draw outside my panel.
If you just want to prevent drawing pixels that are outside of a rectangular region (and I think that's what you're asking), than glScissor is exactly what you're looking for.
In lwjgl, you can find the function in org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11.
If you want to scroll a larger scene within a fixed region on the screen, the most straightforward way to go is by just modifying your projection matrix for the scroll position and redrawing the scene. If you are using gluPerspective to set up your projection matrix you'll have to convert it to a direct call to glFrustum; if you're using glOrtho it's much more straightforward.
Keep in mind that "scrolling" a perspective view has no one right way to do things - it depends on what sort of effect you want to achieve, and what particular sort of distortion you want near the edges of the overall viewport.
I am developing a document based application for Mac OS X. It's a kind of media player, but instead of playing audio or video files it is supposed to open text-files containing meta-data specifying OpenGL animations. I would like to mimic Apples QuickTime X window style. This means, i have to do all the window drawings myself, because Cocoa has no appropriate window style.
There is one thing which gives me headaches: The rounded corners usually to be found on Mac OS X windows. I tried using the borderless window mask and working some CGS magic - there are some private Apple headers which allow window shaping, but they are of course undocumented. I was able to cut rectangular holes in my windows edges, but i couldn't figure out how Apple achieves rounded corners.
Creating a transparent window and drawing the frame myself does not work, because an OpenGL viewport is always rectangular, and the only way to change it is to turn on NSOpenGLCPSurfaceOpacity for alpha transparency and using the stencil buffer or shaders to cut out the edges, which seems like a hell of a lot of overhead.
If i put an OpenGLView into a standard Cocoa window with titlebar, the bottom edges are rounded. It seems this is happening at the NSThemeFrame stage of the view hierarchy. Any ideas how this is done?
Use a layer-backed view, and do your drawing in the CALayer on an invisible window. Layers include automatic handling of rounded corners and borders.
Background for CALayer is in the Core Animation Programming Guide. To create a layer for NSView, you need to call [view setWantsLayer:YES]. You would create a CAOpenGLLayer and assign it to the view using setLayer:.
See CALayerEssentials for sample code demonstrating how to use CAOpenGLLayer among other layer types.
Since Robs suggestion didn't work and no one else contributed to the discussion i settled on using the stencil buffer to crop the windows corners. I did this by creating a texture from the windows background and rendering it into the stencil buffer, discarding all transparent pixels. Looks fine, but is slow when resizing the window :/
in my opinion the iPhone has a big advantage to other smartphones because of its intuitive, smooth and good feeling scrolling components in UIKit. I want to implement a simple game with UIKit which uses this kind of scrolling, but i can't use UIScrollView because it isn't customizable enough.
I tried to implement this scrolling myself and tried two different approaches:
I used a UIPanGestureRecognizer und moved the bounds of my custom control according to the translation the recognizer delivers me. In order to get this smooth scrolling after lifting my finger during the movement I start an animation. I use the velocity the recognizer gives me and a fixed time in order to calculate how far it should scroll after I lifted my finger. I tryed a linear movement and a ease-out movement, but both looks strange. (more later on that)
I use OnTouchMoved and OnTouchEnded to implement the scrolling. In OnTouchMove I move the bounds according to the movment of the finger. While the finger moves I calculate the difference in location and time of the current and last touch in order to calculate a velocity myself. When the finger lifts I start an animation in OnTouchEnded like in 1. but I use my self-calculated velocity instead.
Both approaches are not giving me the results I want. After lifting my finger, the scrolling is not smoothly continued. There seems to be a (sharp) bend in the celocity curve.
Has anyone an idea how apple does this smooth scrolling? My current guess is that my interpolation with two really close points is to inaccurate and doesn't take the current acceleration into account.
Thx for your thoughts!
Kie
Why don't you add a UIScrollView as handle on top of your view, without visible content. Then you can use the UIScrollViewDelegate methods to update your real view on certain actions. For example: if you capture the scrolling of the UIScrollView using scrollViewDidScroll: , you can update your visible view with the offset of the scrollview. You can use the scrollViewWillEndDragging: to start synchronizing the main view with the scrollview, and scrollViewDidEndDecelerating to stop synchronizing.
I use the same approach to scroll the background of my Animix app. It has an invisible scrollview at the bottom, to give the user the feeling he can drag the grass to the left and right to move the background.