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Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

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Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#191
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly, they won't. Text input and manipulation is so incredibly ugly and hard, that basically nobody cares it enough to to it really well. Unicode to start is complicated. Then you have things like bidirectional text. Line breaking is complicated. There are no accepted practices for a lot of use cases. Hyperlinks. Embedded content like images. Copying/inserting html and other formats. Styling content. Renderin…

Nobody is saying Godot should implement their own text engine. There are several available ones they can use, or just pick whatever the platform offers. > Why would you want to render text in a gaming engine in the first place ... Just about every game needs text, including Unicode text. Every proper engine handles it.

" just pick whatever the platform offers."

The platform does not offer anything.

"Just about every game needs text, including Unicode text. Every proper engine handles it"

No, what they do is paste a few characters on screen, handling a more common subset of Unicode. They don't come close to handling most of the things I described above.

Not even Qt handles text well - Qt allows you to do some fun 3D things with text, but not you can't open 100K lines of formatted code like VSCode.

Webkit is just as bad - MS had to invent 'Monaco' a huge layer on top to be able to manage text properly and it's kind of a hack.

Simply put nobody does it well out of the box.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#193

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.

Why would any software not use an established scripting language like Python or JavaScript? Isn't it just makework and reinventing the wheel (badly)?

If you threw out everything about Python that was unnecessary it would turn out that's more than 90% of Python and therefore it's worth making a python inspired language from scratch. Using python directly would probably make Godot worse.

I personally dislike the python ecosystem and am not missing anything.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#194
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…

It's odd to see the "just 20MB" phrasing. I guess even native applications have expanded to the point where 20MB seems small, but in absolute terms I still consider that quite large --- to put things into perspective, a full installation of Windows 3.11 , the OS with all of its included applications, is less than 20MB. I wonder if, in another 20 years, we may see people speaking of "just 20GB"...

Bear in mind the current standard is Electron, where the average size of an app is ~120Mb.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#196
post #170

If you want to use this in a business, either for an internal tool or for an application you sell, this is a horrible idea. Godot doesn't display native widgets, so it has no support for accessibility, for example to screen readers and blind users. Some people think blind people bring too little profit to care, but this is wrong for one single reason. There are some laws mandating accessibility, and more laws are bei…

> Godot doesn't display native widgets, so it has no support for accessibility, for example to screen readers and blind users. Isn't this also the case with Google's Flutter on iOS by default?

Flutter on Android too, from what I understand--unless it has changed recently.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#198

If you want to use this in a business, either for an internal tool or for an application you sell, this is a horrible idea. Godot doesn't display native widgets, so it has no support for accessibility, for example to screen readers and blind users. Some people think blind people bring too little profit to care, but this is wrong for one single reason. There are some laws mandating accessibility, and more laws are bei…

Cut the crap, if you're app is really successful you're gonna end up re-writing the UI at least three times, trust me, and you're probably also have to maintain different multiple UIs (think Android native, iOS native, web etc.)...

No biggie if one of them is opengl based and might be expensive to add accessibility to it...

Oh, and stop spreading fud in general, you might use an accessibility-friendly toolkit and still end up with a practically unusable for visually impaired ppl UI, just as you can make a custom coded UI screen reader friendly...

Just be honest, accept that UI dev will eat up at least 50% of your resources if you wanna do it right, don't cheap out on it, embrace re-writes and maintaining multiple versions of similar functionality things, and stop being afraid of new tech...

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#199
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is saying Godot should implement their own text engine. There are several available ones they can use, or just pick whatever the platform offers. > Why would you want to render text in a gaming engine in the first place ... Just about every game needs text, including Unicode text. Every proper engine handles it.

" just pick whatever the platform offers." The platform does not offer anything. "Just about every game needs text, including Unicode text. Every proper engine handles it" No, what they do is paste a few characters on screen, handling a more common subset of Unicode. They don't come close to handling most of the things I described above. Not even Qt handles text well - Qt allows you to do some fun 3D things with text…

> The platform does not offer anything.

All major platforms offer advanced text rendering support.

How do you think Windows or macOS render their UI?

> what they do is paste a few characters on screen, handling a more common subset of Unicode.

Some games do that, in particular old ones or indies. Most games do actual text rendering properly.

> you can't open 100K lines of formatted code

You definitely can, but not naively. VS Code doesn't render all the text at once either and neither does any serious text editor.

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