By: Rich Taylor

UI Frame is used for borders and backgrounds for other UI Objects. UIFrames are imbedded in buttons and a few of the container style UI Objects that will be discussed later.

The following attributes are handled by UIFrame:

The following is a list of the texture pieces that make up a frame. They take a texture name as an argument. The texture pieces are:

topleft, topright, top, left, right, bottom, bottomleft, bottomright, fill.

The next set of attributes are methods of mirroring one piece to other pieces. This mirroring happens at render time.

mhtop

Stands for MirrorHorizontalTop. Defaults to false. If true, the Top Left Corner will be mirrored to the Top Right Corner. If combined with mvright, then the Top Left Corner will be mirrored to the Right Bottom Corner.

mhbottom

Stands for MirrorHorizontalBottom. Defaults to false. If true AND mvright is true, then the Top Left Corner will get mirrored to the Bottom Right Corner. If true AND mvright is false, then the Bottom Left Corner will get mirrored to the Bottom Right Corner.

mvleft

Stands for MirrorVerticalLeft. Defaults to false. If true, the Top Left Corner will get mirrored to the Bottom Left Corner. If true AND mhbottom is true, the Top Left Corner will get mirrored to the Bottom Right Corner.

mvright

Stands for MirrorVerticalRight. Defaults to false. If true AND mhtop is true, the Top Left Corner will get mirrored to the Bottom Right Corner. If true AND mhbottom is false, the Top Right Corner will get mirrored to the Bottom Right Corner.

mhside

Stands for MirrorHorizontalSide. Defaults to false. If true, the Left Side will get mirrored to the Right Side.

mvside

Stands for MirrorVeritcalSide. Defaults to false. If true, the Top Side will very mirrored to the Bottom Side.

maside

Stands for MirrorAllSides. Defaults to false. If true, the Left Side will get mirrored to the Top Side, Right Side, and Bottom Side.

The remaining attributes supported by UIFrame follow:

fillstyle

This tells the engine to fill in the center space of the frame with the fill texture using different algorithms. This attribute takes the following string arguments:

center - Center the 'fill' texture.

stretch - Stretch the 'fill' texture to take up the full center.

tile - Repeat the 'fill' texture to fill up the center.

border

This is the thickness of the border pieces in pixels. Note that it defaults to 0. If no border thickness is set, then all the textures besides 'fill' won't show up when the UIFrame gets rendered.

color

This takes color strings to define the color that should be blended with the frame textures.

Note that if a UIFrame doesn't have a height or width defined by its attributes, it automatically inherits the height and width of whatever object contains it.