DirectFrame

A frame is a container object for multiple DirectGUI objects. This allows for the control over several objects that are reparented to the same frame. When DirectGUI objects are parented to a frame, they will be positioned relative to the frame.

DirectFrame has no unique keywords, since it is mostly used to arrange other objects.

Like any other DirectGUI object, the DirectFrame is called as such:

DirectFrame(keyword=value, keyword=value, ...)

For a basic frame, the most used keywords are frameSize, frameColor and pos. For a full list of keywords available for this object you can click, see the DirectGUI page.

As we established above, the most common keywords are:

Keyword	Definition	Value
frameSize	Sets the size of the frame	(Left,Right,Bottom,Top)
frameColor	sets the color of the object’s frame	(R,G,B,A)
pos	sets the position of the object	(X,Y,Z)

Now as an example let us make a single frame appear on the screen, for that the code would be the following:

from direct.gui.DirectGui import DirectFrame

myFrame = DirectFrame(frameColor=(0, 0, 0, 1),
                      frameSize=(-1, 1, -1, 1),
                      pos=(1, -1, -1))

This will give you a black frame appearing at the lower right section of the Panda window.

Keep in mind, if your screen is non-square you will see the background color you have set (or the default one if you have not set any) where there is no frame on screen.

By default, as with any DirectGUI object, DirectFrame is reparented to aspect2d so the will stay fixed on-screen even when your camera moves. Newly created objects usually are drawn on top of already existing ones, unless you change it manually.

Additionally you can position the frame using setPos(). This works with other aspects like scale as well.

The example above would change as follows:

from direct.gui.DirectGui import DirectFrame

myFrame = DirectFrame(frameColor=(0, 0, 0, 1),
                      frameSize=(-1, 1, -1, 1))
myFrame.setPos(-0.5, 0, -0.5)

This will give us a black frame that is located at the lower left side of the screen.

Usually one would decide on one of the ways to read and write values for DirectGUI objects a third way to access and change properties is the following:

myDirectobject["yourKeyword"] = value