Give directdraw a friendly UI... Anyone?

[Caleb]

Hi! I was wondering if you guys came across any thing like a simple add-on class or COM(dll) for easily building a simple UI for directdraw.

What I mean is like an engine that will automatically do Buttons, Lists, Combo boxes, Scrolls like the OCX but in DirectDraw. This is to make it esier for writing a main menu for games. Have you all come across anything like this or thought of doing this before?

(Hope you understand what I'm trying to say. Because I don't know how else to explain...)

[Zaei]

Most people will write their own system. It isnt very complicated, as long as you dont try to do anything super fancy. You would also have to create windows and such in code, but this isnt such a hard thing (and you could write your own editor, if you wanted). You simply need to realize that most basic controls are simple a collection of windows. A scroll bar, for instance is a window, that contains 3 other windows (the arrow buttons and the thumb). A textbox is a window that takes key input, and echos it. A Label is an invisible window that displays text. A multi line textbox is simply a combination of a scrollbar and a text box, or a label.

Z.

[CornedBee]

But when doing these things in DD, you don't need to worry about the concept of windows if you don't want to, or reduce it to something simpler, like "a window is an area that can be clicked to make an action hapen".