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Displaying HTML inside of Torque?

by Dreamer · in Torque Game Engine · 04/22/2005 (7:41 am) · 42 replies

I'm just wondering if anyone has ever gotten HTML to display inside of a Torque window.

I know we can open a webbrowser while playing, but this has issues when a game is running full screen in linux under KDE (It makes the game appear to freeze, when in reality we have just given focus to a child window rendered behind the full screen game).

Anyways this functionality could be useful for a number of reasons, but my thinking is to replace the current help system, with a dynamically updated help from my website.

Thoughts?
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Torque Owner Sam3d
#1
04/22/2005 (7:34 pm)
Has to be html...?

You should be able to update the contents of a popup gui with a call to your server.
If you have php on it, shoudn't be too hard. 

function getPhp(){   
	%server = "www.your server.com:80";   
	%serverpath = "/";
	%requeststring = "/hello.php";   
	%upd = new HTTPObject(showPhp){};   
	%upd.post(%server, %serverpath @ %requeststring, "", %upd);
}
	
function showPhp::onLine( %this, %line) {
 	echo("server pinged"); 
	echo("reply is: " @ %line); 
}


the hello php file... 

<? echo("hello from remote server"); ?>

Associate Ben Garney
#2
04/24/2005 (5:50 pm)
I'd suggest using the ML control to do this, and exporting stuff in ML. It's not great but it's good enough for lightweight in-game displays.

Torque Owner Dreamer
Default Studio Name
#3
04/25/2005 (2:36 am)
Where can I get more info on ML and the ML control system?

Associate Ben Garney
#4
04/25/2005 (3:21 pm)
Look at GuiMLTextControl?

Torque Owner Daniel Allessi
#5
04/25/2005 (3:42 pm)
ML = MultiLine btw

Torque Owner Nathan Martin
TRON 2001 Network
#6
04/25/2005 (3:58 pm)
I think it would be very interesting if somebody were to create a TGE resource to use Mozilla's Gecko engine to do HTML rendering inside of Torque. I have no idea how hard it would be to pull off since I've never looked into how Mozilla and Gecko were interfaced. Could be a good path to go down and get a real web browser engine inside of your game.

Just an idea. :)

Associate Ben Garney
#7
04/25/2005 (7:27 pm)
It's a great idea, and ridiculously complex. If someone has a working such implementation, let us know! :)

Torque Owner Dreamer
Default Studio Name
#8
04/25/2005 (8:07 pm)
@Ben maybe it's not so far off, the QT toolkit has a fairly decent crossplatform HTML renderer, with a super simple interface, and I'm pretty sure I could get it to link into a torque app (at least on a linux box). Only problem is I'ld need to buy a license to create something that could be redistributable. :(

Associate Ben Garney
#9
04/25/2005 (11:37 pm)
Nevermind that getting it to render to a GL context at any speed is going to be an exercise in pain... Of course, you could port it to doing rendering via GL entirely but that's a LOT of work. Trust me, I've looked hard at this problem.

Torque Owner Dreamer
Default Studio Name
#10
04/26/2005 (4:37 am)
Ok, Ok so thats not such a great option, oh well time to figure something else out for this portion of the game.

Torque Owner Kenneth Porter
#11
04/26/2005 (5:35 am)
It looked to me like Half-Life 2 is using the IE control for things like MOTD rendering. Anyone know for certain? (If that's the case, it kinda gives me the creeps, given IE's security record.)

Torque Owner Dirk "dirkk" Krause
#12
04/26/2005 (6:16 am)
@Kenneth: I am quite sure HL2 does not.

@Dreamer: at a first glance ML seems to be quite similar to HTML; couldn't you just serve ML from your server and put it in some UI control?

My impression from the menus of the demo was that ML is sufficient for most of the things that I would intend to do with text in a game.

Torque Owner Dreamer
Default Studio Name
#13
04/26/2005 (6:28 am)
Bah! I'm still trying to find an existing GUI control using ML, from which to figure this same thing out, yes serving ML would be pretty trivial for a PHP app to do, but I need to see a currently functioning GUIMLControl to figure out what needs done.

Torque Owner Dirk "dirkk" Krause
#14
04/26/2005 (8:44 am)
Isn't it GuiMLTextCtrl??

Torque Owner Dreamer
Default Studio Name
#15
04/26/2005 (9:23 am)
What should have said is I am looking for somewhere in code that a ML based control is currently being implemented, so I can look at the implementation and learn from it, thats really the quickest way for me to do that sort of thing.

Associate Ben Garney
#16
04/26/2005 (10:09 am)
Look at the help screen. Press F1.

Torque Owner Dreamer
Default Studio Name
#17
04/26/2005 (10:13 am)
Ahh ok, it was right infront of me and I wasn't seeing it, thanks!

Torque Owner Sam3d
#18
04/26/2005 (10:19 am)
Glad you found it... would be interested in seeing the results.

Torque Owner Dreamer
Default Studio Name
#19
04/26/2005 (10:59 am)
This is kinda cool, I just took a good long hard look at the RPGDialog resource, and noticed that I may be able to adapt it to display short small webpages, this opens up a whole world of possibilities :)

Torque Owner Nathan Martin
TRON 2001 Network
#20
04/26/2005 (3:41 pm)
Also you might find my first and only popular resource useful (shameless plug)
News GUI control for receiving news content from a web server
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