Announcing Coherent UI 2.0
Nearly 15 months ago we launched the first official version of Coherent UI – the modern HTML5-based UI library for games. Since then we’ve released more than 35 updates, added many new features, platforms and engine integrations. Coherent UI now powers dozens of games, simulations and applications. We are working closely with great companies that use our SDK to create amazing user interfaces and we are constantly inspired by their work.
Now we bring forth the biggest update to date – version 2.0. We have included the most requested features from our users. We believe that this new release reaffirms Coherent UI as the number one choice game user interface solution and in-application browser.
We want to provide a clean and usable API, which means that sometimes we have to modify it. The new features require significant API changes which prompted us to release them as a major update. The 1.x product line will still be fully supported and receive important fixes even after the official release of Coherent UI 2.0.
Amazing games like Planetary Annihilation use Coherent UI
Preview of the new features in Coherent UI 2.0
Dynamic views – Views now can request the creation of new child Views – for instance triggered by links in web pages. Clients will now be able to open the new Views on the requested pages with all the DOM sharing supported by modern web browsers. This feature allows for easier use of modern web applications like Google Drive that often open new tabs.
Custom audio playback – Audio and sounds played by the browser, including WebAudio will can be played through the game audio API – OpenAL, XAudio, WWise, FMod etc. This gives full control of the UI audio in game settings and playback options and allows achieving more interesting audio effects in the UI.
Full HTTP header control – Users will now have full control over the whole HTTP communication and will be able to modify HTTP headers, responses and use custom ones. The current “coui” protocol also will be a first-class HTTP protocol, supporting seeking and content length requests to allow streaming.
Multiple custom protocols – In addition to the current custom “coui” protocol, users will be able to define their own ones. This will make trivial grouping different UI resources under different protocols like “image://”, “asset://”, “audio://” as well as adding special logic to different groups of resource.
Multiple contexts support -User will now be able to create Views with different web contexts – that is different cookies, credentials, cache paths, local storage and user agents. This will allow for the creation of isolated Views in the same application and a much more powerful user management experience.
If you want to see those and many other new things we are working on, come and check out Coherent UI 2.0 on our GDC booth #931!
Shortly after the event we’ll start sending the Beta versions of the library. The official release is planned a couple of months after the Beta.
