Lua interface to Awesomium

[Niosop]

I was going to wrap the Awesomium library so it was accessible via Lua inside and outside the editor, but then I noticed the licensing on it. Basically it's free for non-commercial projects but fairly pricey for commercial stuff ($5k per application).

 

What I need to know is if enough people are interested in using it in a non-commerical project to make it worth my time, or if there's enough demand that Josh might be willing to negotiate a LeadWerks wide license agreement with him.

 

The other option I have is to bypass Awesomium altogether and wrap up the Chromium API directly (basically duplicate Awesomium), but this is likely to be a lot more work.

 

What do you guys think?

[gordonramp]

It looks excellent but at that price.. I don't think there would be many takers.

[Josh]

I guess the question is what is the most common thing someone would use this for? We recently saw an example of render to texture being used for a CCTV system. When would you want to render video footage to a 3D surface, that couldn't be rendered in real-time? It was a really cool technical demonstration. What would this normally be used for in a game?

[Niosop]

Oh, the video portion is LGPL so can be used for free in any game as I posted it. The Awesomium library is the wrapper around Chromium to render web pages onto a texture, and that's what costs.

 

One of the big advantages to being able to render web to texture is for GUI systems. Since there's already a TON of JS and Flash GUI widget kits available that look really nice, being able to reuse those for your own menu system could be a huge time saver. I'm sure I can think of hundreds of other uses for web->texture though.

[Josh]

How do you get feedback from the web player? Is there a way to do that, or do you just get graphics back? A GUI doesn't do much good if there isn't a way to find out what was clicked and what it means.

[Niosop]

Yeah, the API provides a way to get feedback. I'll need to look at it closer to see how friendly it is, I stopped researching it when I saw the $5k pricetag, but if there was enough interest I'd be willing to spend some quality time w/ it.

[TylerH]

By law, the guy who wrote Awesomium can't legally charge money for it. You can't wrap a library that is entirely open source, publicize your source code, and then force people to pay $5,000 for it.

 

You could simply use the library with any disregard for the guy's license, considering, last time I checked, Google > Single Programmer, atleast in legal power.

[Niosop]

Open Source is a big term, encompassing lots of different licenses. Chromium is BSD licensed, so he can do whatever he wants to it. Apple did the same by taking portions of BSD and integrating them into OSX and selling that. If it was GPL, then he wouldn't be able to do so, but as it's BSD he's totally within the law to charge whatever he wants for it.

[VicToMeyeZR]

I say, make your own wrapper for chromium.

[Niosop]

Looked at it briefly and it looks like a lot of work. Which is why he's selling it for $5k per license. If it was trivial I doubt he'd set that price point.

[VicToMeyeZR]

lol.. yeah, I am sure.

[Niosop]

He just updated his licensing making it more reasonable. http://www.khrona.com/2010/02/08/overhauled-commercial-licensing-for-awesomium/

 

<$500 for Indy projects puts it in reach for some of us. I still think it would be cool if an engine wide license was negotiated for, I'd be glad to work on the actual integration if the financing was taken care of

[Josh]

That seems like a pretty reasonable price, if you have a finished game and are ready to publish.

[TylerH]

Interesting, still free for non-commercial use, for the win.

[paramecij]

I have implemented Awesomium in c++ and use it to display in-game help and prop gallery where the user clicks on a thumbnail of the prop and i retrieve the filename from the link (similar to garry's mod). I have it kind of hacked-in at the moment, but i will eventually build a proper system around it if it proves useful enough after i explore all the different possibilities. It's good because i can easily construct a string with html in code or the user can produce the .html externally in his program of choice. I'm too lazy to make my own proper gui, and It may seem overkill but I don't really like CEGUI and other solutions they look like too much hassle, here i just set it up and it sort of takes care of itself..plus i had it working in a couple of hours

[cocopino]

The idea of having HTML as a GUI system is fantastic; many of us can slap together a HTML page in no time while writing a complete GUI system could take forever.

 

I've tried a couple of solutions in the past to make HTML work with LE but none of them supported JavaScript (needed for swapping pictures) and/or CSS. Haven't tried Awesomium, will look into it.

[Flexman]

To me it just seems like a lot of stuff between you and your game. I've been seeing a logo/trademark recently I hadn't come across before, "Scaleform", like Awesomium I had to Google it. Scaleform is another GUI system but uses Flash at the design stage. Seems very popular (600+ titles many of which I AM familiar with).

 

I don't really have a use for it as I only use LUA for trivial entity level housekeeping. But LUA is lacking a workable GUI interface, if there was such a thing maybe we'd see more sophisticated use of it. Niosop you're in a better position to judge as you're enabling cool stuff to be done with it.

[Rick]

I haven't seen Nio around here is a long time?

[Flexman]

oh, I just saw the date of his last post :/