Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well, I finally finished up my GUI interface and my first widgets, the horizontal and vertical scrollbars. Yes!! And it works! YES!!

*does happy dance*

This is freakin awesome. Now that the GUI framework is in place, I have a set structure to follow in creating the other controls, which makes it easier. I successfully replaced all the Boost::Function calls with the Boost::Signals library. Now GUI widgets can callback more than one object (same for object and button callbacks). Sweet.

I think this is time for some reflection. Let’s see… The earliest date I can find for the Katana Engine is 3/8/04. That’s the day I used Enterprise Architect to turn my UML design into a code framework from which to build off of. So we’ll say the Katana Engine was birthed in March. It’s now November, which means I’ve been working on it off and on for 8 months now. Not bad. The engine is made up of 81 seperate files totaling 8,523 lines of code (11,974 lines with comments included). Sweet. I love statistics . I started working on the GUI 10/7/04, so I’ve been at it for over a month now.

Oh yea! You can all see the GUI in action for yourselves! Check it out here. All the needed DLLs are included and whatnot. It just showcases the scroll bars scrolling an image. The scroll bars will behave like Windows scroll bars, with the exception that the drag bar never changes size and clicking and holding on the slider bar only moves the drag bar once. I’ve also included the source code. Not the engine source, just the source that makes the app tick. It’s only about 40 lines of code, since the files are all templates used in every Katana Engine application so you only have to add code in certain areas (marked by commented TODOs).

So enjoy! Tell me what you think!