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Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Does Lua have access to any GUI features through CMUD? I'm still bent on making those notification windows, but Lua doesn't seem to have a GUI library inherent to the language itself.

Posted: Fri Dec 05, 2008 6:36 pm

You really don't want to try and create the window GUI from the ground up...that is very complicated, and probably still won't give you the kind of notification window that you want. It won't end up being any different than the current #MESSAGE popup unless you do some really low level Windows API stuff.

I think you need to research the suggestion given before about looking for a COM object that can be called from CMUD to create a notification window. Or else you'll need to write your own COM DLL in C (or Delphi) to do this and then call it from CMUD. I really doubt you'll find anything low-level enough in Lua (or any other scripting language) to do this. It will require something that is compiled against the Windows API.

But my guess is that there is already some sort of shared Windows COM object for doing notifications that can be called. You'll just need to research it a bit more with Google. Just be aware that it's not likely to be trivial.

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

I'm not really sure what to look for when I'm searching, any help in that would definitely be appreciated. And this is something I'll definitely put up if I can get it to work out, so others can use it.

Posted: Fri Dec 05, 2008 8:15 pm

Lua doesn't include that sort of library by default because that defies the point of being small - but there're thousands of libraries for it online, which you can require() once you've put them where CMUD will find them (probably the data directory). You just need to find a library that does what you're after.

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 873 Location: USA

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

Wizard Joined: 26 Mar 2008 Posts: 1547

So, yeah. Not knowing anything on how to find or use those DLLs, am I sort of Out of Luck? I searched for some under "notification window DLL" and similar terms. I found a couple, none that I could actually find the download for though. Nor would I know how to use the DLL when I found it...

Posted: Sat Dec 06, 2008 11:01 pm

See if there's some kind of API you can use to get access to the windows balloon tips, because they're probably your best bet. Also, try looking on sites like luaforge and seeing if they have anything you can adapt.