Custom Resource loader about tgui

[texus]

Moving the resource handing out of the widgets has one big problem: the texture manager.
If you load with custom code then the texture manager can't keep track of what you have loaded already and which part it still has to read from the disk.

I have been thinking about this before. The best option probably to provide a method to pass a sf::Texture instead of a filename. Then you just have to store the sf::Texture yourself and keep it alive.

I will be looking at theme files in v0.7 anyway.
I am already planning to allow custom loaders. You would be able to load the theme file yourself (thus choose your own syntax) and then pass the needed information to the widget renderer.
This would allow you to load stuff from the zip archive yourself, load it in a Texture and then pass that Texture to tgui (you will probably have to keep the texture alive yourself somehow).
But writing such a loader would contain pretty ugly code. But at least it would be reusable by other people and it allows doing custom stuff.

[fkrauthan]

Yeah or you implement a standard loader within the GUI library which still works with a simple Resource folder variable and manages the textures. And if people like me need there own loader they have to take care of that. (Most game developers have a TextureManager anyways so there is no real need for the GUI library to implement it too).

[texus]

Since tgui v0.7 will come with a built-in white theme which doesn't require any external images, it should be doable to move the loading code (and perhaps also the texture manager) to a separate file which you include optionally.

There will probably be almost a year between now and the actual implementation. I will just see what I end up with, so many other changes have to be made first.

[texus]

It hasn't really been tested yet, but this should be possible with the new loading system.