Design

Purpose

GG is designed to achieve several goals:

• Platform-independence: GG should be buildable on any platform that supports OpenGL
• Driver-independence: GG should be a standalone GUI framework that does not require any particular application framework; though SDL and Ogre drivers are supplied, GG should be usable with any driver code the user wishes to supply
• Easy extensibility: new controls and GUI behavior should be easy to incorporate
• Complete graphical control for the user/designer: the user should not be limited by the author's lack of artistic skill!
• Independence of UI elements from the source code: GG UI elements should be configurable as text files, so that UI design and alteration should not require a recompilation
• Overall time efficiency: an application with a reasonable number of GG UI elements should not slow down significantly because of the rendering or handling of those elements
• Overall space efficiency: each GG UI element should have a reasonably small data size
• Efficient mixture of 2D and 3D graphical elements: it should be appropriate to use GG in any frame-based 3D application, even a realtime 3D video game
• Simplicity of use: GG UI elements should be able to send arbitrary messages when manipulated by the user; there should be no message passing hierarchy imposed on the user

Features

GG has the following features and services:

• Communication of UI controls via signals and slots
• Support for 2D-, 3D-, and mixed-mode rendering
• Managment of textures and fonts
• Serialization of UI elements

Non-Features

• GG is not fully threadsafe, due to its use of signals and slots
• No sound support is provided

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