Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The IwUI API
The Marmalade SDK ships with an API called IwUI, which allows us to create user
interfaces for our projects consisting of buttons, labels, and other common controls.
This API is very feature-rich and allows interfaces to be created not just for games,
but also for more serious applications. Marmalade used to ship with a tool called
the Marmalade Studio UI Builder, but this is sadly no longer a supported part of
the SDK. However, it is still possible to access this tool by either installing an older
version of Marmalade (one of the v5.2.x releases is probably best) or by downloading
its source code from
https://github.com/marmalade/UI-Builder
.
It is also possible to use IwUI without using the UI creation tool by constructing ITX
files that describe our interface layouts, by hand. These layout files can end up being
quite verbose and therefore hard to maintain, so the Marmalade Studio UI Builder
made editing layouts a bit more manageable.
The Marmalade documentation states that the reason for dropping the UI Builder
from the SDK was to allow a standardized UI markup system to be used that is
supported by a number of other third party tools. At the time of writing this topic, no
further announcement had been made regarding exactly what form this will take.
There seems no doubt that the IwUI API will remain a part of Marmalade for the
foreseeable future. However, we won't be delving any deeper into the API itself
in this topic as it seems likely that a new UI system will be making its way into
Marmalade soon. If you are interested in what IwUI can do, take a look at the
Marmalade documentation and the plethora of sample code that ships with the SDK.
The IwNUI API
Marmalade provides a second user interface API called IwNUI. The "N" stands for
Native, as this API allows you to construct user interfaces using the standard UI
controls for the platform that your application runs on.
This may sound like a good idea but the main drawback is that it is only supported
on iOS and Android. All other platforms will use a default style implemented using
the previously mentioned IwUI API.
At any rate most games tend to implement their own UI that is in keeping with the
style of the game, and this normally means we don't want to use standard OS user
interface controls, but IwNUI is a good choice if you happen to want to develop a
utility or other application type.
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