Chili

Chili UI

Chili is Springs very own GUI framework. It's a flexible, class based framework which allows you to create great looking GUIs very quickly.

In Chili, every element of the GUI has properties that control how it looks, and functions it can call when special events (such as a double click, or mouseover) affect it.

Getting Chili

The Chili repository can be found at https://github.com/jk3064/chiliui. There are two ways to add Chili to your game:

• Include the Chili repository as a git submodule in your project.
• Checkout the Chili repository, and place the files from its /luaui/chili directory into your games /luaui/widgets directory.

If you are having trouble getting Chili to run, login to the lobby and join the #moddev channel (type /j moddev). People there will help you figure it out.

Chili Component Hierachy

The Chili framework is object orientated, and each different component is a class. The hierachy of components, which is documented here, is as follows:

Object
|_ Screen
|_ Control
 |_ Button
 |_ Checkbox
 |_ ColorBars
 |_ ComboBox
 |_ EditBox
 |_ Font
 |_ Label
 |_ LayoutPanel
   |_ ImageListView
   |_ Grid
   |_ StackPanel
   |_ TabPanel
 |_ Line
 |_ Image
 |_ MultiProgressBar
 |_ Panel
 |_ ProgressBar
 |_ Scale
 |_ ScrollPanel
 |_ TextBox
 |_ TrackBar
 |_ TreeView
  |_ TreeViewNode
 |_ Window

Viewing the diagram as a tree, each component inherits from its parent in the tree. In practice, this means each component has the properties/functionality of its own type, and also of all components found upwards from it in the tree. For example, a Grid has it's own properties, but also has those of a LayoutPanel, Control and Object.

Making a GUI from components

Components can have children, which are components that are placed inside it (and in front of it). The parent of everything is WG.Chili.Screen0 , which has type Screen. The x-y coords, width, height, etc, of a component are relative to the area covered by its parent component.

For example:

  screen = WG.Chili.Screen0
  window = Chili.Window:New{parent = Screen0,   x='25%', y='25%', width='50%', height='50%'}
  textBox = Chili.TextBox:New{parent = window,  x='10%', y='10%', width='80%', height='30%', text="Is the sky blue?"}
  yesButton = Chili.Button:New{parent = window, x='10%', y='60%', width='30%', height='30%', caption="Yes"}
  noButton = Chili.Button:New{parent = window,  x='60%', y='60%', width='30%', height='30%', caption="No"}

draws a Window in the center of the screen, containing a TextBox with the words "Is the sky blue?", and two clickable Buttons, for yes and no. It looks like

(TODO: picture).

See the example widgets for how to add extra features, such as making stuff happen when the buttons are clicked.

There are many ways to specify (and change!) which components are children of which other components.

• To match the parent= used above, each component has a children={[1]=firstChild, [2]=secondChild, ...} table.
• There is also the functions AddChild, RemoveChild, SetParent, ClearChildren and others.

Example Chili Widgets

(TODO: improve/update these)

Lesson 1 : Hello World

Lesson 2 : Dynamicly change label content

Lesson 3 : Command and Build commands in a chili window