Weekly update: Zircon & Caves of Zircon

Zircon

This week we worked on enhancing the new input handling mechanism with focus and activation events. A new UIEvent class was introduced: ComponentEvent. It comes with 3 new types: now you can listen to FOCUS_GIVEN, FOCUS_TAKEN and ACTIVATED ComponentEvents. Focus events are self-explanatory but ACTIVATED is a new concept. Activation happens, when an interactable (Button, ToggleButton, etc) component is either clicked or [Spacebar] is pressed when they are focused. We used MOUSE_RELEASED so far, but it was kind of confusing so we moved it to the new ACTIVATED event!

Scrollable and Scrollable3D now supports scrolling to a given visible offset. Thanks for /r/coldwarrl for the contribution!

There is also a new feature which was mentioned by some folks on Discord: debugging help. Zircon now comes with a logger which is set up for the project (both for Swing and LibGDX). What’s more useful is that we’ve started adding proper and insightful debug statements throughout the codebase which you can enable by editing the logger config in logback.xml. The most important part is that you can enable only those parts which you are interested in so you won’t get an undecypherable mess. The config looks like this:

This file goes to /src/main/resources

<configuration>

    <!-- We only print to the console (stdout) by default using the following format -->
    <appender name="STDOUT" class="ch.qos.logback.core.ConsoleAppender">
        <encoder>
            <pattern>%d{HH:mm:ss.SSS} [%thread] %-5level %logger{36} - %msg%n</pattern>
        </encoder>
    </appender>

    <!-- Logging is set to info by default for our console logger -->
    <root level="info">
        <appender-ref ref="STDOUT"/>
    </root>

    <!-- You can either set logging level for whole packages -->
    <logger name="org.hexworks.zircon" level="warn"/>
    <logger name="org.hexworks.cobalt" level="warn"/>

    <!-- Or individual classes -->
    <logger name="org.hexworks.zircon.api.component.Button" level="debug"/>
    
</configuration>

We’ll gradually add proper debug statements throughout all of the api classes so if you have trouble with any of them just enable debug logging and you’ll see what happens, no additional setup needed. It looks like this:

19:58:14.149 [main] DEBUG o.h.zircon.api.component.Button - Button (id=efe8, enabled=true) was rendered.
19:58:14.153 [main] DEBUG o.h.zircon.api.component.Button - Applying color theme: DefaultColorTheme(primaryForegroundColor=DefaultTileColor(red=248, green=237, blue=209, alpha=255), secondaryForegroundColor=DefaultTileColor(red=197, green=207, blue=198, alpha=255), primaryBackgroundColor=DefaultTileColor(red=157, green=157, blue=147, alpha=255), secondaryBackgroundColor=DefaultTileColor(red=71, green=72, blue=67, alpha=255), accentColor=DefaultTileColor(red=184, green=106, blue=106, alpha=255)) to Button (id=e60a, enabled=true).
19:58:14.154 [main] DEBUG o.h.zircon.api.component.Button - Button (id=e60a, enabled=true) was rendered.
19:58:15.540 [LWJGL Application] DEBUG o.h.zircon.api.component.Button - Button (id=e60a, enabled=true) was mouse entered.
19:58:15.540 [LWJGL Application] DEBUG o.h.zircon.api.component.Button - Button (id=e60a, enabled=true) was rendered.

These changes will be added to the skeleton projects as well for ease of use. The input handling documentation page was also updated with the recent changes. Take a look at it here.

There were also some upgrades:

• #180 Window titles were not displayed for quite some time, but they are now fixed: screenshot
• #196 Icons now can use any Tile object not just GraphicTiles.
• #193 There is now a FadeIn, a FadeOut and a FadeInOut modifier contributed by /r/coldwarrl!

News flash for Kotlin devs!

/r/coldwarrl bumped into Korge which is a multiplatform game engine written in Kotlin which enables its users to run their games on all platforms supported by Kotlin MPPs. This means that projects using Korge work on the JVM, in the browser, on Android and on native platforms (even iOS in theory).

We’ll take a look at Korge soon to see how it performs with Zircon. Since Zircon is also an MPP in theory it is easy to integrate it with Korge which would mean that you can run Zircon programs (for all intents and purposes) everywhere. Note that this is only for Kotlin devs.

Caves of Zircon Tutorial

The input handling code is not in place in the tutorial project and we’re working on the next article with the new code. It comes next week, so stay tuned!