borealis

Controller and TV oriented UI library for PC and Nintendo Switch (libnx).

⚠️ Warning: the project is a WIP - See the Projects tab to follow the journey towards a stable version!

The code for the old version is available in the legacy branch.

⚠️ The wiki only contains the documentation for the old version of the library, it has yet to be updated!

• Mimicks the Nintendo Switch system UI, but can also be used to make anything else painlessly
• Hardware acceleration and vector graphics with automatic scaling for TV usage (powered by nanovg)
• Can be ported to new platforms and graphics APIs by providing a nanovg implementation
• Powerful layout engine using flex box as a base for everything (powered by Yoga Layout)
• Automated navigation paths for out-of-the-box controller navigation
• Out of the box touch support
• Define user interfaces using XML and only write code when it matters
• Use and restyle built-in components or make your own from scratch
• Display large amount of data efficiently using recycling lists
• Integrated internationalization and storage systems
• Integrated toolbox (logger, animations, timers, background tasks...)

Building the demo for Switch

To build for Switch, a standard development environment must first be set up. In order to do so, refer to the Getting Started guide.

cmake -B build_switch -DPLATFORM_SWITCH=ON
make -C build_switch borealis_demo.nro -j$(nproc)

Building the demo for PC

To build for PC, the following components are required:

• cmake/make build system
• A C++ compiler supporting the C++17 standard
• GLFW version 3.3 or higher (as a static library)
• GLM version 0.9.8 or higher

Please refer to the usual sources of information for your particular operating system. Usually the commands needed to build this project will look like this:

cmake -B build_pc -DPLATFORM_DESKTOP=ON
make -C build_pc -j$(nproc)

Also, please note that the resources folder must be available in the working directory, otherwise the program will fail to find the shaders.

Building the demo for PSV

• install VITASDK
• install glfw-vita
• put *.suprx files (PVR_PSP2) to psv/module
• put sce_sys files to psv/sce_sys

We only need: libGLESv2.suprx libgpu_es4_ext.suprx libIMGEGL.suprx libpvrPSP2_WSEGL.suprx

PSV support is experimental at present, and it is very slow to run.

cmake -B build_psv -DPLATFORM_PSV=ON
make -C build_psv borealis_demo.vpk -j$(nproc)

Including in your project (TL;DR: see the CMakeLists.txt in this repo)

0. Your project must be built as C++17 (-std=c++1z). You also need to remove -fno-rtti and -fno-exceptions if you have them
1. Use a submodule (or even better, a subrepo) to clone this repository in your project
2. Copy the resources folder to the root of your project

Here is my work with borealis: https://github.com/xfangfang/wiliwili