Skinning system about gum HOT 2 OPEN

I think the hardest part of this is a skinning system which allows for the creation of brand new components. I'm not sure how to handle this.

I have thought about it a bit and I think what might be good is to have a section for global variables. For example, a global variable could be referencing a folder for all textures. Then variables could reference global variables in part or in whole.

This would require simple "operations" for variables as well, if the skinning is to be done with different source folders. For example, if an app has two root folders called Skin1 and Skin2, then there would be a global variable called RootSkinFolder and the variable for texture might be:

{global::RootSkinFolder} + Buttons/Button.png

@bjorn thoughts?

from gum.

@vchelaru The thing about global variables and skin folders seem to have little to do with my request. I'm not talking about applying a global skin to change the look of the UI components. Rather, this request is only about a system where the behavior and the appearance of a component can be separated.

In the simple case, I have a Button component that implements click behavior and related state handling, and in Gum I would be able to instantiate this component multiple times, but specify a different skin on each button instance because buttons rarely look the same everywhere. Because in this case, the appearance of the button is entirely defined by its skin, this use-case is already covered by Gum by simply placing the "skin" instance as a child of the "button" instance. The only downside in this simple case is that the default size of the button is not taken from its skin, so it needs to be set explicitly on the button instance.

The cases that are not currently supported are basically things like scroll areas or windows, or skinnable containers in general. The biggest limitations being the ones I listed above, namely that the skin can't place things both in front and behind the children and that it can't affect the area where the children get placed.

from gum.