UI Rework Discussion

[penolakushari]

I've had some ideas on what could be added to SMH's UI going further, main idea was to make it possible for others to create their own SMH layouts and do whatever within them, given they know how to work with GLua and all of the UI things that come with it. So that sort of calls for modularity, like some other features me and vlazed discussed over steam dms, and I'm yet to transfer some of these into discussions here for rest of people to see.

First of all, having ability to swap UIs should be neat, as that could allow to create a "legacy" UI that is closer to SMH 2.0/3.0 (current workshop version), so people who want to keep things as they were, more or less, could use that one so they won't have to relearn a lot of the stuff + as to not screw up their muscle memory. Though, if they were using properties menu often + timelines stuff, some relearning would be needed anyway...

So, for first thing here we'll need to discuss on how to go about the "core" of that UI. I was wondering if it may be possible to have an UI element that would prevent anything else from being drawn on top of it, probably by always being drawn on top of everything else + not letting anything else get dragged past it, if dragging windows option would be implemented. This is what I was thinking for a "main" UI which would have buttons to open windows for selecting SMH layouts, and other settings which could be of the sort that you don't have to mess around with much. For the looks, I thought it could be like GMod's top of the screen part in Q and C menu, one where you can set NPC AI settings and etc, something that's out of the way and doesn't take up that much of the screen.

This probably will need some more thinking about, considering new features that could be added and etc. Probably that "tab" could also include an X button to close SMH, in case if binds stop working too.

[vlazed]

Panel:SetZPos controls which panels get drawn on top of other panels

https://wiki.facepunch.com/gmod/Panel:SetZPos

Wiki reports a max of 32767 which you can draw panels. If you wanted to draw this over other panels with the the same ZPos, you'd have to iterate over those panels and temporarily decrement their zpos value, and then set it back when you close the SMH window... that's assuming that such addons don't prevent you from doing that.

With ZPos that begs the question of whether that affects how child elements are rendered within the main UI. That's something to test

[penolakushari]

If that element was created and drawn after everything else was initialized, technically that should put it over everything else as well? well, unless some other UI manipulations would be made after that point

[vlazed]

That's usually the behavior that I see after doing Panel:Add or vgui.Create with the parent argument. What I'm wondering, now that you mention that, is if panel:SetZPos (or its C equivalent) is called when you add a child panel inside a parent and whether that increments and has the same limits.

[vlazed]

It appears that Panel:MakePopUp can force rendering over other panels. That is documented in Panel:MoveToFront(), which might suit our purposes more so than SetZPos

https://wiki.facepunch.com/gmod/Panel:MoveToFront