Enhancement: Add ability for users to resize `UITextureButton` while keeping the border thickness

[eschan145]

UITextureButton is commonly used, because you can fully customize look and feel of your user interface. However, there is no feature to be able to resize the texture without stretching it.

The given texture is usually a button with a border.

However, some people may want to resize the graphic without creating a new texture or stretching it. Below is a resize picture without its borders stretched.

But if you don't resize the border, the picture will look overly stretched and deformed.

This feature will allow users to change their size of their texture button without creating a new image entirely. I asked a question on SO several months ago on this. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73920748/how-to-resize-an-image-keeping-the-thickness-of-its-border/73922383#73922383

[pushfoo]

Your stack overflow post has pictures depicting 9-patch textures which we've already implemented as NinePatchTexture. I'm pretty sure it's brand new for 3.0, so I'm not surprised you hadn't seen it yet.

Runnable example with UITextureButton:

import arcade
from arcade import load_texture
from arcade.gui import NinePatchTexture, UIManager, UITextureButton


class MyView(arcade.View):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        self.ui = UIManager()

        # This is what you want to use. It has mostly the same API as Texture.
        ninepatch_tx = NinePatchTexture(
            left=5,
            right=5,
            top=5,
            bottom=5,
            texture=load_texture(
                ":resources:gui_basic_assets/window/dark_blue_gray_panel.png")
        )

        self.layout = arcade.gui.UIBoxLayout(align="center", children=[
            UITextureButton(
                text="wide",
                width=100,
                height=20,
                texture=ninepatch_tx
            ),
            UITextureButton(
                text="tall",
                width=50,
                height=100,
                texture=ninepatch_tx
            ),
        ])

        self.ui.add(self.layout)

    def on_show_view(self):
        self.ui.enable()

    def on_hide_view(self):
        self.ui.disable()

    def on_draw(self):
        self.clear()
        self.ui.draw()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    window = arcade.Window(200, 200, "UIExample", resizable=True)
    window.show_view(MyView())
    window.run()

[pushfoo]

You'll want to see the contents of #1682 for more information on how to use this class.

For example, UITextureButton currently has multiple texture arguments for different states, each of which can accept a different NinePatchTexture.

[eschan145]

I haven't been in arcade for a while and there has been a lot of new features since. 🙂

[pushfoo]

Btw, I wanted to thank you for including a diagram of the intended behavior in your StackOverflow post. It was very helpful in understanding your intentions, and I appreciate you linking it. 👍