Announcing our new release – Coherent UI 1.2.1
Coherent UI in Planet Annihilation
First we would like to show some pre-alpha footage of Planetary Annihilation the devs from Uber Entertainment have put online. The footage looks great and it is going to be a terrific game, we can’t wait to see more and play it. Oh, and by the way, the user interface is powered by Coherent UI.
New release
We have recently released Coherent UI 1.2.1. It has two major new features – handling of downloads and exporting .Net objects with their methods to JavaScript. Also we have re-designed our internal task scheduling routines and gained up to 30% performance improvement. That helped us to improve the on-demand views, which are now much faster.
Downloads Handling API
Coherent UI supports a full in-game browser and now using the SDK developers can add download file functionality. When the user clicks on a downloadable file the API provides a notification and the developer can handle the download. API also allows developers to make direct file download request, with progress notification and multiple protocols support.This opens a myriad of new possibilities like using Coherent UI for your game’s launcher or updater – achieving both a visually stunning front-end and easy to code download/update functionality, without the need to handle the transfer yourself or to integrate other third-party libraries.File download also enables developers to integrate seamlessly advanced social features like users sharingphotos, videos or other content. Also game asset streaming – downloading resources in run-time becomes a piece of cake to implement. The potential usages of the feature are countless and the combo UI/browser/file downloads makes Coherent UI much more useful set of tools for many more tasks on top of user interface implementation.
.Net/Unity3D Method binding
Since its very first release Coherent UI already supported binding and executing of arbitrary .Net delegates by JavaScript. However it required explicit registration of each delegate via the View.BindCall and View.RegisterForEvent methods, which made it somewhat time-consuming and prone to typos. So we’ve added a new feature, that automatically exports .Net object with all of its methods to the browser JavaScript. This means you can call any .Net method on any object writing only a single line of code.
How it works?
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using Coherent.UI; using Coherent.UI.Binding; namespace MyGame { class Options { public bool SetWindowSize(int width, int height); } class MyGame { Options m_Options; BoundObject GetOptionsForUI() { // wrap m_Options so its methods are exported return BoundObject.BindMethods(m_Options); } void OnViewReady(View view) { view.BindCall("getOptions", this.GetOptionsForUI); } } } |
Here is how we use the Options instance in JavaScript:
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engine.call('getOptions') .then(function (options) { return options.SetWindowSize(1920, 1280); }) .then(function (result) { // chaining of promises works so // result is the boolean returned by m_Options.SetWindowSize if (result) { console.log('resolution changed') } else { console.error('could not change resolution'); } }); |
Note that for every method of the .Net object that has return value, calling the JavaScript method returns a promise for this result.
This cool feature is available only for .Net and Unity3D for now, but we are going to add it to the C++ API too.
Follow Dimitar on Twitter: @DimitarNT
