MASkinG is an Allegro addon library written in C++ that provides you with an extremely powerfull and flexible system for building exceptionally cool looking graphic user interfaces (GUIs for short). It can be used for games as well as for "normal" applications. As the name suggests everything in MASkinG is skinnable. There is a small number of skins already available and it is very easy to create new ones as well.
When I first saw Allegro I was amazed for two things. For one I never even imagined such a cool game programming library existed and secondly I just couldn't believe how its GUI section could be so ugly. So I downloaded a few addon GUI libraries and was pretty disappointed with all of them except one: DeGUI by Doug Eleveld. DeGUI was a C++ GUI library that had a very nice C to C++ interface, looked quite good as it was and it was very easy to adapt and extend. The only problem was that Doug had abandoned the project years ago (in 1997 or 1998 I think) and went on to do greater things (DEPUI). So this meant that if I wanted to see some bugs fixed (there were a few) and some functionality added I had to do it myself. Soon I started hacking on it and adding things like skin support and all that but abandoned it after a while. About the time Allegro 4.0 came out I decided to have another go. I started all over again this time taking only the core of DeGUI and adding some of the new Allegro GUI code and adding a lot of my own work.
Version 0.65 was the last in this line but event though it wasn't that bad I wasn't completely satisfied with it yet. Some things didn't work well and some didn't work at all so I decided to do another complete rewrite. This time I rewrote the entire library from scratch using only the knowledge and experience I gained working on the previous version and only very little old code. The new MASkinG is now better and cleaner but as a result it's API is not compatible with the old versions and as a GUI library is a major project quite a lot of old functionality hasn't yet been implemented in this version.
If you find this library usefull and you think it is worth improving then drop me a note. Say what you liked and what you didn't like and what you would like to see in a future release. There are still many bugs in the code, some are big and serious - these are hard to spot and even harder to fix - but some are really just silly little mistakes and typos like forgeting to initailize a variable or calling a wrong function at the wrong place and things like that. If you look at some of the code and you think to yourself: "Why the heck did he do that for?" then you've probably found one of those bugs so I'd really appreaciate it if you could report it to me so I could fix it or maybe you could fix it yourself and send me the fixed code.
It would also be very nice if someone could write one or two additional widgets. See the todo/wish list for which are badly needed. There already are enough to start building complex applications but such contributions are always welcome.
Another thing that would also make me very happy is if someone could draw some nice skins to be used with MASkinG. I'm not a very talented artist so you are unlikely to see an original skin made by me. Most of my skins are just conversions, mostly from WindowBlinds skins. If you make a skin you think is cool then send it to me and I'll include it in the next version (and you will get into the contributors list).
This documentation is intended for three kinds of people:
- me
- developers
- users
Even though I am the author of this library I need this documentation so that I don't forget how it all works, developers who want to hack on MASkinG and perhaps improve it will read some parts and users who want to use MASkinG dialogs in their projects will read some other parts. If you read a section and you don't even know why that would be good to know then just skip it - it's probably not even meant for you.
Anyway, most of the class docs are divided in several parts: data, private methods and interface. If you want to start using MASkinG right away you should only read the "interface" sections and the example code but if you want to see how certain things work you can have a look at the "private" sections and the source code itself.
MAskinG is distributed under the zlib license (see license.txt in the root directory). This basically means that you can do pretty much anything with it except claim it's your work. You may use, modify, redistribute, and generally hack it about in any way you like, and you do not have to give me anything in return. However, if you like this product and you find it usefull you can thank me by giving me something in return. This could be by providing a useful bug report, making an improvement to the library, or perhaps just releasing the sources of your program so that other people can learn from them. If you redistribute parts of this code or make a game or application using it, it would be nice if you mentioned MASkinG somewhere in the credits, but you are not required to do this. I trust you not to abuse my generosity.
Note though that this does not apply to any third party libraries MASkinG uses, especially not to the FreeType project that is used for rendering True Type and other formats of fonts.