natinusala / borealis

Hardware accelerated, controller and TV oriented UI library for PC and Nintendo Switch (libnx)

borealis

Controller and TV oriented UI library for PC and Nintendo Switch (libnx).

⚠️ Warning: the project is a WIP - See the Projects tab to follow the journey towards a stable version!

The code for the old version is available in the legacy branch.

⚠️ The wiki only contains the documentation for the old version of the library, it has yet to be updated!

• Mimicks the Nintendo Switch system UI, but can also be used to make anything else painlessly
• Hardware acceleration and vector graphics with automatic scaling for TV usage (powered by nanovg)
• Can be ported to new platforms and graphics APIs by providing a nanovg implementation
• Powerful layout engine using flex box as a base for everything (powered by Yoga Layout)
• Automated navigation paths for out-of-the-box controller navigation
• Out of the box touch support
• Define user interfaces using XML and only write code when it matters
• Use and restyle built-in components or make your own from scratch
• Display large amount of data efficiently using recycling lists
• Integrated internationalization and storage systems
• Integrated toolbox (logger, animations, timers, background tasks...)

Building the demo for Switch

To build for Switch, a standard development environment must first be set up. In order to do so, refer to the Getting Started guide.

(sudo) (dkp-)pacman -S switch-glfw switch-mesa switch-glm
make -j
nxlink -s borealis_demo.nro

Building the demo for PC

To build for PC, the following components are required:

• meson/ninja build system
• A C++ compiler supporting the C++17 standard
• GLFW version 3.3 or higher (as a static library)
• GLM version 0.9.8 or higher

Please refer to the usual sources of information for your particular operating system. Usually the commands needed to build this project will look like this:

meson build
ninja -C build
./build/borealis_demo

Also, please note that the resources folder must be available in the working directory, otherwise the program will fail to find the shaders.

Building the demo for Windows using msys2

msys2 provides all packages needed to build this project:

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-meson mingw-w64-x86_64-ninja mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config mingw-w64-x86_64-glfw mingw-w64-x86_64-glm
meson build
ninja -C build
./build/borealis_demo

Including in your project (TL;DR: see the demo makefile in this repo)

0. Your project must be built as C++17 (-std=c++1z). You also need to remove -fno-rtti and -fno-exceptions if you have them
1. Use a submodule (or even better, a subrepo) to clone this repository in your project
2. Copy the resources folder to the root of your project
3. For PC (meson):
   1. take a standard meson file
   2. use subdir to import the library folder
   3. use the borealis_files, borealis_dependencies, borealis_include and borealis_cpp_args variables for respectively objects to build, dependencies (glfw...), includes directory and cpp args
   4. add a BRLS_RESOURCES define pointing to the resources folder at runtime (so resources)
4. For Switch:
   1. take a standard deko3d homebrew makefile (from the switch-examples repo)
   2. add a BOREALIS_PATH variable containing the subfolder you put the library in
   3. set ROMFS to the resources folder - borealis resources path is set to romfs:/ in borealis.mk
   4. use include to load borealis.mk (after LIBDIRS and BOREALIS_PATH)
   5. it's important for OUT_SHADERS to be set to shaders since nanovg will look for the shaders there
   6. if you have issues with the BRLS_RESOURCES define (missing quote terminator), change the @$(MAKE) line to @MSYS2_ARG_CONV_EXCL="-D;$(MSYS2_ARG_CONV_EXCL)" $(MAKE) in the Makefile (as in the demo Makefile)