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Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

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Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#2
QtWidgets works really hard to try and remain native (both by reusing the platform window pointers, and mimicking style and functionality). That for me is worth it. While the article constantly complains about dev tooling size, a reasonable complaint, my DLLs I ship w/ my Qt program are just 20MB (so I'd suspect a similar size increase to a single binary were I to statically link). If I didn't care about native look and feel I might have gone GTK3 (absent from the comparison here).

Having said that, the other issues concerning Qt may be valid, but for a code-only set of widgets, they work for me. For these kinds of comparisons to have value, you have to list the pros and cons of all things, not just the pros of what you like and cons of what you don't.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#3
No mention of overdraw, pixel perfect rendering, layout performance, power consumption, view recycling/scrolling, or render caching (caching the composition result).

Does Godot handle this stuff well? I have no idea. I wish the post did a better deep dive. I know Unity doesn't compare well to the native APIs in these regards.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#4
I did a lot of tutorials on my YouTube channel on how to start making GUI applications with Godot. The visual scripting is really bad for now, so I would stick with GDScript (a Python like language) or C#. It is really a great piece of software to make something quick for non-technical people. I really recommend anyone to explore and play with it a bit and I'm sure you'll find a use for this amazing engine.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#6
This just reads like a godot advertisement...it only has good things to say about godot and only bad things to say about any other library. It's really hard to take the article seriously with so much blatant bias. It also seems to leave out any technical information that a developer using the engine would want to know, like how well it integrates with existing code, what paradigms it uses compared to other UI engines, or whether it uses lazy rendering or if it constantly runs at 60fps, etc.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#8
post #6

This just reads like a godot advertisement...it only has good things to say about godot and only bad things to say about any other library. It's really hard to take the article seriously with so much blatant bias. It also seems to leave out any technical information that a developer using the engine would want to know, like how well it integrates with existing code, what paradigms it uses compared to other UI engines…

It's not a Godot advertisement. The author is just excited about exploring the possibility of using a game engine for UI development. The point of this article isn't supposed to be a full dive into the nuts and bolts of using of Godot for UI development or anything, just a speculative piece about a novel use for this piece of technology. I doubt the author even knows the answers to a lot of the questions posed.

It's just bringing up an option that most developers wouldn't even consider. This article is asking a question, and just focuses on providing enough detail to frame that question.

I don't think the negativity is justified.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#9
post #6

This just reads like a godot advertisement...it only has good things to say about godot and only bad things to say about any other library. It's really hard to take the article seriously with so much blatant bias. It also seems to leave out any technical information that a developer using the engine would want to know, like how well it integrates with existing code, what paradigms it uses compared to other UI engines…

I made this comment when someone was talking about using GLFW and IMGUI to make an application with a openGL window and I think it applies here too, because it is easy to overlook the things that you will eventually need that are not trivial to add once you go down the road of using tools made for only very basic UIs.

"I would bet that the easiest thing would be FLTK. You can use system colors and make an openGL window while having everything else you would expect in a UI library. Executables with no dependencies start at a few hundred KB and it is very fast. There is even a single big pdf for documentation and dozens of examples that show off every widget. FLTK is very underrated these days because no one is out there marketing it.

GLFW and IMGUI are great libraries, but once you start wanting a program with various modal and non-modal windows, menus, widget layout, a native look, file dialogs, fonts, drag and drop, copy and paste, unicode, spreadsheet tables, physical printing, custom widgets, functions to hide OS specific system stuff (like stat, directory listing etc.) you might wish you had started with something made for what you are trying to do. "

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#10
post #7

UIs in game engines are pretty different from the look-and-feel you get using native components or QT. Even with Electron apps, the text fields and buttons that you start with are at least native to the platform.

That's definitely true. OTOH it does seem that fewer and fewer applications are designed to match the native look-and-feel. A game engine would not be a good choice if that was a goal of your project, but I don't think most projects these days are too bothered about that.
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