Widget for displaying animated GIFs

[laudrup]

First of all thanks for this great and very useful library.

I am currently using TGUI for making a small game for my daughter (not made public yet but I plan to) and I had the need to display some simple animation.

For my use case it would be the simplest to use an animated GIF, so I found some public domain C code for GIF decoding here and used that to implement a TGUI widget. Proof of concept code here.

Don't worry too much about the current implementation, it was just to show my idea. In order for it to be useful I would have to rewrite parts of the C library being used to support loading of data with TGUIs ImageLoader and a bunch of other things.

My question is whether you might be interested in such of Widget for the TGUI library? If that is the case I will do my work directly in the TGUI sources and send a pull request at some point.

I imagine it might be useful for such a widget to be extended later on to support other kinds of animation (maybe with the help of ffmpeg or similar).

Would you be interested in such a widget at some point?

Thanks a lot.

[texus]

A long time ago there actually was an AnimatedPicture widget (which used a sprite sheet instead of a GIF), but it was removed because I didn't want to keep maintaining it. I also don't really think that animated picture or video playback components are really part of the UI.

Having animations in the UI (e.g. button that has a changing texture) is something that I'm open to, but it would likely not be implemented with GIF files. So not a lot of code for an animated GIF widget is reusable for that use case either.

So I'm not really interested at this point in merging it as an official widget.

[laudrup]

It makes perfectly good sense that animations might not be part of a UI framework and I understand that there's already enough code to maintain as it is.

You do have some very nice functionality for testing drawing etc. which I could definitely use for implementing the animated gif widget, so I'll base my implementation on your repository to get easy access to that.

I might send out a pull request at some point that I'll then expect you to reject for the good reasons you already pointed out unless you definitely don't want that.

Thanks a lot.