Windowing
The windowing system handles anything related to the display, and the application windows.
The default window
By default, snow will create a window for you, which can be configured through the config function override in your app, which is discussed in guide one.
The default window config is stored against the app.config.window node for later reference, and doesn’t affect the window after config happens.
To change the properties or state of the window, you would use the window instance directly, from app.window. This allows you to change things like the title, the window decorations, fullscreen state, changing the position or size of a window after it is created.
The same applies for windows that you create manually, the window instance is used to manage the window, including removing the window through destroy.
Disable the default window
There are times a window is not desired, for example, on a headless server or for command line applications. To bypass creating the default window, you would set the flag has_window on the AppConfig in the config function to false.
You can see an example of this in the tests/unit/ folder, where the application runs without a window, or a main loop.
override function config( config:AppConfig ) {
config.has_window = false;
return config;
} //config
Rendering and Window Events
To listen for window events, you assign an onevent handler directly to the window. Likewise, for rendering, you assign an onrender handler to the window that will be called whenever the window is being rendered.
Only call rendering commands within here, as the function ensures that the window is current for drawing into, and ensures that drawing happens in order with the window swapping (unless you handle this manually, see advanced control below).
An example of rendering and event callbacks, window events and window docs.
override function ready() {
app.window.onrender = on_render;
app.window.onevent = on_window_event;
} //ready
function on_render( window:Window ) {
// ...draw stuff
} //on_render
function on_window_event( event:WindowEvent ) {
switch(event.type) {
case WindowEventType.window_resized: {
//handle resizing
}
case WindowEventType.window_focus_gained: {
//handle focus change
}
} //switch type
} //on_window_event
Advanced control
By default, windows will swap automatically, but this can be disabled through the window.auto_swap = false; flag, and you must call window.swap() when you want it to swap the buffers. Also by default, windows will call render automatically, along with the rest of the windows. To control the window rendering manually, disable the window.auto_render flag and call window.render manually.
This is of course not required, and is for advanced use only.
Windowing features
The app.windowing instance on the other hand, is the window manager. This tracks the existing windows, and exposes api functions for the desktop and systems to use to handle vertical sync, the system cursor state, or anything that is not directly related to a window in particular.
Anything related to a window would be from the window instance, everything else is from the window manager.
You can see the full list of options from the windowing api docs.
Take note that some functions are platform specific, such as the name of the display on web is going to be the browser name, not the physical display name and so on.
Creating multiple windows
To create a window, simply call app.windowing.create( window_config:WindowConfig ) with the requested config. This config is a request, and not all features might be honored by the OS window system, or the platform. To find out what config you really obtained, the returned Window instance has a config and an asked_config node for comparison.
override function ready() {
var window2 : Window = app.windowing.create({
title:'second window',
resizable : true,
width : 320,
height : 420
});
} //ready
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