Coloring the widgets

Coloring the widgets

If you have played a little bit with the included examples, you may have noticed that the color scheme consists mostly of grey shades, like old versions of Windows. For a game, chances are you will like to change this. Fortunately, guisan provides an API for this in the Widget class:

• setBaseColor()
• setForegroundColor()
• setBackgroundColor()
• setSelectedColor()

Now the question is: which is which? The following table summarizes the use of these colors in the existing widgets. When in doubt, check the code.

Widget	baseColor	foregroundColor	backgroundColor
Button, ImageButton, ImageTextButton, ToggleButton	background, shadows	text, focus rectangle	-
Checkbox, RadioButton	shadows	text, focus rectangle, check/circle	background of the clickable area
Icon	shadows	-	-
InputBox, MessageBox, Window	background, shadows	caption text	-
Label	border (if any)	text	-
ListBox	border, shadows	text	background
PasswordField, TextField	border, shadows	text, caret	background
ProgressBar	shadows	text (if any)	background
ScrollArea	everything, except...	arrows	-
Slider	shadows, border, background, marker	focus rectangle	-
TabbedArea	borders, shadows	-	-
TextBox	-	text, caret	background, border

Notes

• ListBox also uses selectedColor for the background of the selected element. ProgressBar uses it to draw the bar itself.
• For the many elements where baseColor is used for multiple items, darker and lighter shades are computed by adding or subtracting fixed values to all three (RGB) components of the color. While this works fine for greyscale, some surprises may be expected for other colors, so be careful.
• Color choices may propagate to subclasses (see for example MessageBox and Window), but they NEVER propagate to child objects: setting a window text to red will not set the labels inside it to red too.