Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot • Hacker News Board

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#41

Post by irq-1 » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 11:41 PM UTC

qppo wrote: post #34

How well does godot support dynamic/programmatic layout (w.r.t odd aspect ratios and resizing), localization, and accessibility? I'd also take issue with the notion that 2D UI frameworks based on game engines are more performant than their alternatives, because game engines are optimized for 3D graphics and often struggle with performance once your UI state becomes reasonable large.

> How well does godot support dynamic/programmatic layout (w.r.t odd aspect ratios and resizing),

Very well (it's a game engine)

> localization, and accessibility?

Poorly and not at all. Godot has a student adding PO files:

https://godotengine.org/article/gsoc-2020-progress-report-1#...

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#42

Post by yakz » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 11:42 PM UTC

skratlo wrote: post #33

yakz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: "From February onward, everyone, including open-source Qt users, will require valid Qt accounts to download Qt binary packages." - https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020

Yes, binary packages are convenience, you could be paying for those if you're lazy to build the open source from the source.

In the context of the situation imagined in the article, "blatant lie... guy is nuts" is over-doing it.

While "you need to download and compile the framework from source" is an option, "you need 5gb and to register an account for the download" is also a fairly plausible way to present it if that option offers time savings vs the former to the person you're hoping to review your project.

I'm reading your response as jumping to "lazy" and "cheap", which I find to be pretty uncharitable. The Qt Company is free to demand whatever they like, but nobody has to like the demands.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#43

Post by naikrovek » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 11:46 PM UTC

Shared404 wrote: post #30

I did an Ask HN [1] about this topic a little while ago. Most relevant comment [2], from gunibert is here: The problem in a framework like GoDot is, that it is meant for Games. A game renders screens in 30/60 fps. A Desktop application like a Gtk application does exactly nothing if you dont interact with the application. If you click a button only the button gets re-rendered. This is more efficient then using somethi…

Game engines very much do understand efficient rendering techniques, and if they don't, you can usually easily extend them to have that capability, sometimes without even writing any code to do it.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#44

Post by yoz-y » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 11:50 PM UTC

In part criticizing SwiftUI:

> While you get a GUI inspector panel for your GUI components you are still forced to largely write the GUI in code.

Well yes. The time and experience (at least for me) has shown that designing UIs anywhere outside the code will eventually bite you. Not to mention that from the very moment a second person joins your team you can practically throw your version control system out of the window for UI files. Thanks but no thanks.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#45

Post by wlesieutre » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 11:52 PM UTC

yoz-y wrote: post #44

In part criticizing SwiftUI: > While you get a GUI inspector panel for your GUI components you are still forced to largely write the GUI in code. Well yes. The time and experience (at least for me) has shown that designing UIs anywhere outside the code will eventually bite you. Not to mention that from the very moment a second person joins your team you can practically throw your version control system out of the win…

Interface Builder is all fun and games until you have a merge conflict in a storyboard. It's all XML files so you'd think it'd be solveable, but SwiftUI makes the code representation so much more readable.

And really, you can drag and drop elements into the live previews and it writes the code for you, including automatically wrapping existing components in horizontal/vertical stacks as needed to arrange the layout. So SwiftUI still has some of the visual UI editor benefits, just broken into smaller pieces with a much more useful text representation.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#46

Post by naikrovek » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 11:55 PM UTC

skratlo wrote: post #22

There is so much bullshit and lies about Qt5, I won't bother finishing that piece of crap: Erik Engheim: Qt5 is 5GB Actual fact (on arch linux): qt5-base = 64.07 MiB, qt5-declarative = 24.72 MiB, qt5-quickcontrols2 = 8.56 MiB > Try having somebody look at a Qt design you made. “Oops sorry you need a 5 GB download to do that. Oh and btw you need to register an account on a website, login and search really hard to find…

I don't know enough about Qt to know if you're right or wrong, but I know enough about game engines to know that whatever Qt is or isn't, it doesn't negate the usefulness of game engines.

I have written a few 3D applications in both Unity and Unreal, and I can tell you that the cross-platform build process with those is impressive. I can package an app for three different platforms and get pixel perfect equivalent output and the exact same behavior on all three platforms without any trickery at all.

Qt probably also does this, and that's great! Qt existing doesn't take away from the utility of game engines, is all, nor the reverse.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#47

Post by yoz-y » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 11:57 PM UTC

gameenginz8 wrote: post #19

Thaxll wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For one applications need familiarity and uniformity. Games don't. For example games have exactly zero accessibility support, system actually knowing about what is being rendered is quite useful for it to provide tools like voice over. What about IME?

> If we’re going to optimize ONE stack

Why would we though? There are different classes of applications and there are multiple platforms with different conventions. Different use cases require different tools. Every time something "to rule them all" was tried, multiple niche tools grown around.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#48

Post by naikrovek » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 11:59 PM UTC

qw3rty01 wrote: 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 ok to be excited about stuff and to write about it.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#49

Post by Shared404 » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 12:00 AM UTC

m3at wrote: post #40

Shared404 wrote: post #30

I did an Ask HN [1] about this topic a little while ago. Most relevant comment [2], from gunibert is here: The problem in a framework like GoDot is, that it is meant for Games. A game renders screens in 30/60 fps. A Desktop application like a Gtk application does exactly nothing if you dont interact with the application. If you click a button only the button gets re-rendered. This is more efficient then using somethi…

As mentioned in the article Godot has a low processor usage mode: > If true, the engine optimizes for low processor usage by only refreshing the screen if needed https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_os.html...

Today I learned, thanks for the link.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#50

Post by fish45 » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 12:33 AM UTC

malkia wrote: post #37

How would this work on 2 or 3 monitors. Asking this, since any serious content creator tool end up using windows across monitors, and there you need good docking support. Qt has some, but not all the way there, like Visual Studio has (but there are some good alternatives for Qt). The other two pain points (for DCC): - HDR support (again across monitors) - Hi-DPI support (and again across monitors) Once you start hitt…

I'm not too up to date with Godot news, but I remember that a recent update (maybe devlog?) added good multi monitor support to the editor, and therefore the gui toolkit of the engine, since the editor uses the engine.