iT2D Menu: Performance Improvement

In my humble experience, if you try to create a menu with iTGB, adding let's say 5 buttons, it takes almost a second to load a menu (especially on a iPod). If you have more menu, navigating them with this delay it is not ideal.

I found a simple but effective solution to it.

Edit guiBitmapButtonCtrl.cc and substitute the existing setBitmap function with the following:

void GuiBitmapButtonCtrl::setBitmap(const char *name)
{
   mBitmapName = StringTable->insert(name);
   if(!isAwake())
      return;

   if (*mBitmapName)
   {
      char buffer[1024];
      char *p;
      dStrcpy(buffer, name);
      p = buffer + dStrlen(buffer);

      mTextureNormal = TextureHandle(buffer, BitmapTexture, true);
	  //just use normal for now, let's see if performance improves
	  mTextureHilight = mTextureNormal;
	  mTextureDepressed = mTextureHilight;
	  mTextureInactive = mTextureNormal;
   }
   else
   {
      mTextureNormal = NULL;
      mTextureHilight = NULL;
      mTextureDepressed = NULL;
      mTextureInactive = NULL;
   }
   setUpdate();
}

From what I understood, every time the engine load a menu, it will try to load for each button 5 files: the file name that you specify in the GUI editor and the equivalent _n _h _d _i. For instance, in our game, we didn't have any of the other 4 files, therefore the engine was accessing the "disk" 20 times unnecessarily (4 times x 5 buttons).
By using the code above, the engine will only load the file specified in the GUI editor and it will assign the same file for the other modes: n h d i.

If you still want the "mouse hilight" effect, you have to use the following code instead of the line 16-18 above:

//mTextureHilight = mTextureNormal;
dStrcpy(p, "_h");
mTextureHilight = TextureHandle(buffer, BitmapTexture, true);
mTextureDepressed = mTextureHilight;
mTextureInactive = mTextureNormal;

I don't think mTextureDepressed and mTextureInactive will ever be needed on iDevices.

Thanks,
Selvin