a menu kit: AgileMenu

Showcase
1

Well, my AgileMenu is finally polished enough to post.

Features
Specify your menu with an indented outline.
Style it with cleverCSS, an indented form of CSS.
Any number of sub-menus
Pop-up ( can be dynamically shown or hidden. )
Menu types:
Horizontal menu bar
Vertical
Draggable ( Vertical with title bar and close box )
Menu item types:
parent ( has sub-menus )
button
radioBTN ( only one of several has ‘on’ state )
checkBox ( has binary state )
checkAll ( check all checkBoxes in a group )
unCheckAll ( un-Check all checkBoxes in a group )
info ( present hints, help, hot-keys, etc. )
More info and download available at my site:http://www.a-p-i-c-a-l.com/agile-menu-for-panda3d.html

Best regards, Joe

2

I’ve added sound effects.
You can specify sounds to attach to menu item’s click and roll-over events.
Simply add the following properties to selectors in your .ccss file:

menu:
    titleBar:
        drag-sound: amb1.mp3  // a continuous sound modulated by drag
                                         // speed
        drag-sound-volume: 0.1  // not required, defaults to 0.5
        drag-sound-rate: 222.0  // not required, defaults to 111.0
    parent, horizontal:
        enter-sound: enter.mp3
        enter-sound-volume: 0.2  // not required, defaults to 0.5
        // exit-sound: leave.wav // (exit-sound rarely used: clashes with the
                                 // enter-sound)
        // exit-sound-volume: 0.2
        ...
        ...
    button, checkBox, radioBTN, checkAllBTN, unCheckAllBTN, close:
        press-sound: press.ogg
        release-sound: release.mp3
        ...
        ...

A gotcha:
Don’t put these properties under state selectors (:hover, :click, etc.), they will have no effect.

Finer Points
So your menu doesn’t seem hokey or amateurish:
Choose a very short sound for enter-sound so that the sounds don’t overlap as you mouse about.

Turn down the volume:

enter-sound-volume: 0.2

works good, depending on the sound file.

The provided examples are way over-done for demonstration purposes.
Note that there is a volume property for each sound property:
enter-sound-volume,
exit-sound-volume,
press-sound-volume,
release-sound-volume,
drag-sound-volume.

Control the drag sound frequency with drag-sound-rate.
It’s hard to find a good drag sound; I made one up using Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/).
Drag sound amb1.mp3 is several seconds of white noise with a 100hz low-pass filter.

Here are some good free sounds: http://www.flashkit.com/soundfx/Interfaces/

This is my first Panda3D project. I decided to create AgileMenu because DirectGUI doesn’t include a menu suitable for my more ambitious project. Also I didn’t find the following contributed menus til after AgileMenu was well underway:
ynjh_jo’s menu: [url]Popup Menu & Drop-down Menu Bar]
piratePanda’s menu: [url]Expandable Menu System]
Praios’ simpleMenu: [url]simple menu [broken]]
sharkz’ menu: [url]My menu]
panda3d’s panda3d.rocket: [url]libRocket example]
and any others?

It seems I’m going down a pretty well traveled path. Oh-well, I offer it FWIW.

Call for Feedback
I tried to provide for segmented (like in libRocket) bitmap backgrounds using PNMImage, but the results were glitchy and blurry. Too bad the Canvas Class was abandoned. (https://www.panda3d.org/manual/index.php/The_Canvas_Class)
Anyway, I’m happy with my procedural backgrounds and outlines: but how important are bitmap backgrounds to you?
AgileMenu’s sub-menus ‘flyout’ on roll-over: do you need ‘click-to-open’ sub-menus?
Should sub-menu(s) close when an item is clicked?
This being my first p3d project, am I overlooking something important?

The updated download is available at my site: http://www.a-p-i-c-a-l.com/agile-menu-for-panda3d.html

3

This looks very interesting. Big thanks. Some people might find it very useful.

But I wonder why you didn’t stop development after seeing all the alternatives. Especially Librocket allows you doing any GUI in xhtml and css (sort of).

4

hey - thanks for response.

I did try out Rocket; I like the way you can decorate items with css. I ported suckerfish menu (http://htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/example/) to libRocket and they sort-of worked. They didn’t transition well as I moused about. Maybe rocket and css are hogging cycles? In hind sight I suppose I could (should) have replaced the css actions with python.

I also stayed with my menu because it seems like Librocket would be an additional heavy-weight layer between the user and the game: constant interaction between xhtml and css. I didn’t do any tests though. Your thoughts?

Anyway AgileMenu is ready to sail, and I’m ready to devote more time to bigger and better things.

Well, onward and upward, Joe

5

Another version, minor revision: I structured the distribution’s directory.
Now the stuff you need for your app is in sub-directory agilemenu.
The example files are in the root directory, except that the example sounds are in the sound directory.

I welcome comments and suggestions.

The best to you, Joe

More and download: AgileMenu