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Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

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11–20 of 259 posts

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#11
JUCE is another option one could explore for cross platform non-web UI.

It's generally used to make audio apps and plugins, but these require UIs are after all. I'm fairly certain the first versions of Ableton Live were made with JUCE, I'm not so sure about the later ones. MaxMSP is also made with JUCE.

https://juce.com/

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#12
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…

To be fair the author is writing about his high-level view of the future in the perspective as a big fan of Godot. With that in mind, I think you'll be disappointed by the answers to you questions. On paper, Godot (or any other game engine) obviously makes no sense to most people for these kinds of UI, but having people like the author go against the grain to explore the possibility is great.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#14
I’ve often wondered why more desktop software and data analysis stuff isn’t written in something like Unreal.

- optimized across platforms - optimized net code libs - modal collaboration tool: build in blueprints or code (basically web components before web components) - advanced visualization - source control integration - the frontend can be backend language agnostic, swap C++ for Rust over time - no web assembly needed - heavily polished ergonomics and UX - custom input map support is robust, tools can have their own keymap (we aren’t secretaries!)

The tech world at large is really addicted to the toolkits of the wrong companies, IMO

Apples “pro” dev tool in Xcode feels like a boring business tool.

Once closed desktop tools are now free for development with a market for making money now. Godot is just as open as Visual Studio or Firefox, minus the DOM, JavaScript, etc.

Cloud infra and micro services can still be what they are, all the usual safety features.

Web/mobile development landscape just feels bloated and insane compared to building once in Unreal or Godot and outputting to multiple platforms like the game engines are doing.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#15
post #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…

I think if you are going for native widgets with a more lightweight (and more liberally licensed) bent, then wx is a solid option too, though it requires a bit more manual UX work, even though it uses native widgets for real (even in some places Qt doesn't).

But other than Qt or wx, I really can't get behind these new GUI platforms which keep cropping up. They all have too many issues and don't end up presenting a native experience (or often even a good one).

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#16

I’ve often wondered why more desktop software and data analysis stuff isn’t written in something like Unreal. - optimized across platforms - optimized net code libs - modal collaboration tool: build in blueprints or code (basically web components before web components) - advanced visualization - source control integration - the frontend can be backend language agnostic, swap C++ for Rust over time - no web assembly n…

Because the overhead and complexity is huge and useless. Unreal is not optimized to make GUI application, it's used to make games. Engines don't have anything useful to make modern app on the desktop.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#18
post #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…

Qt Quick, btw, seems to have learned a lot of lessons from game engines by their tech (all OpenGL) and terminology ("scene graph").

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#19
post #16

I’ve often wondered why more desktop software and data analysis stuff isn’t written in something like Unreal. - optimized across platforms - optimized net code libs - modal collaboration tool: build in blueprints or code (basically web components before web components) - advanced visualization - source control integration - the frontend can be backend language agnostic, swap C++ for Rust over time - no web assembly n…

Because the overhead and complexity is huge and useless. Unreal is not optimized to make GUI application, it's used to make games. Engines don't have anything useful to make modern app on the desktop.

The overhead and complexity of a dozen different IDEs, JS frameworks, 4 browsers, 2 mobile phone platforms, etc etc is less complex?

In a day to day engineering perspective it’s all a mess of abstraction and indirection anyway?

If we’re going to optimize ONE stack, I’d prefer the one with all the optimized rendering and input mapping, rather than hacking that all into a bloated document parser like we’re hacking into a browser?

IMO that is textbook functional fixedness.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#20

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.

> visual scripting is really bad for now

Are there any visual scripting languages that aren't terrible? The system in unreal works but every time I use it I find myself wanting a text editor (I have spent years learning to program well, be that C++ or shaders, just let me do that!).

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