31–40 of 63 posts
Making GUIs with game engines is the future not because they are easy to develop with, but because the moment AR and VR become common we already have tools to make 3D interfaces
I don't think 3D interfaces really offer anything of value beyond 2D interfaces. I've never once in my life been using software and thought the GUI would be much better rendered onto the inside of a cube or something.
Very unlikely. Godot has those features because game devs often need to make UIs for the game e.g. menus, etc. A decent game engine has to have that kind of functionality. Godot dogfooding is not a good indicator of it's potential as a ui toolkit. It's probably easier for them since they might need specialized components and because they're already familiar with the tools. There's a very strong advantage unique to th…
You can't make the argument that people only use Godot for application development because it's what they're familiar with, and then bring up Electron as a countercase. Electron literally only exists because of existing familiarity with web tech.
Very unlikely. Godot has those features because game devs often need to make UIs for the game e.g. menus, etc. A decent game engine has to have that kind of functionality. Godot dogfooding is not a good indicator of it's potential as a ui toolkit. It's probably easier for them since they might need specialized components and because they're already familiar with the tools. There's a very strong advantage unique to th…
You can't make the argument that people only use Godot for application development because it's what they're familiar with, and then bring up Electron as a countercase. Electron literally only exists because of existing familiarity with web tech.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't make the argument that people only use Godot for application development because it's what they're familiar with, and then bring up Electron as a countercase. Electron literally only exists because of existing familiarity with web tech.
Web applications are still applications, and web applications and desktop applications are closer than applications and games.
I'm not really sure how that logic follows, as games are also just applications, and although the web was not designed as an application platform, but rather as a hypertext document browsing / delivery platform, yet people managed to wrangle it into performing fairly decently as an application platform, so why not game engines for application development? (I've actually seen more than a few really interesting and useful applications built in Godot and other game engines already, and I'm quite sure more are coming.)
Am I weird that I enjoy HTML/CSS for GUI and Layout? With CSS grid of course. Hell I love Godot, but the fact that you can't do something as simple as give a component a max width is so annoying.
Very unlikely. Godot has those features because game devs often need to make UIs for the game e.g. menus, etc. A decent game engine has to have that kind of functionality. Godot dogfooding is not a good indicator of it's potential as a ui toolkit. It's probably easier for them since they might need specialized components and because they're already familiar with the tools. There's a very strong advantage unique to th…
C#+WPF/UWP had Expression Blend since the mid 2000s and it's only been getting worse ever since (and MS said they have no interest in bringing MAUI support to Blend which is probably their biggest foot-gun yet).
Godot has the same sweet features that Blend had but in a modern platform and with cross-platform export, yes it has many many rough edges, but it's been getting visibly better year after year and it shows no sign of stopping.
Anyone who thinks building UIs in Electron today is peak developer UX should just check out what it was like to build on WPF in 2009. They had all the shiny of today plus sane ways to do things eg. keyframe animations with custom easing etc without having to resort to insane workaround like importing them from After Effect with custom libraries.
And yes I know about Qt Design Studio, but my experience with it was AWFUL, from being an absolute minefield in the installation experience due to how Qt tries to upsell you on their commercial offering, to having a UI flow that looks like Blend if you took out most of its features out, to having to deal with QML (which honestly feels like a downgrade coming from XAML) and then you have to tie everything with C++? It wasn't appealing back then and honestly it still feels like an alpha today.
Inasmuch as desktop applications continue to exist, the future is Electron. The only applications for which there is still demand for traditional GUI apps are military and medical device applications.
Electron is literally write once, run anywhere. It's leaps and bounds beyond anything else in this regard. RAM is cheap, and a few hundred megabytes per installation are a small price to pay for increased productivity and accelerated time to market.
It's the exact opposite of the modern view layouts that try to cache view images to reduce the draw work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
2% marketshare despite the incredible pricing, but ok.
For an OS most of us would consider useless that's been around for maybe a quarter of the time desktop Linux has been and half the time OSX has 2% is pretty impressive. As to the pricing, it's not like Desktop Linux doesn't work very well on cheap hardware either. OS popularity comes down to social things like PR (especially with children) and has little to do with merit.
It's almost as if readers of HackerNews aren't the target audience of ChromeOS.
> As to the pricing, it's not like Desktop Linux doesn't work very well on cheap hardware either.
It's almost as if potential Linux users aren't the target audience of ChromeOS.