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Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

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Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#141

Post by dkersten »

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…

> Honestly I don’t remember much of the details of what QML was like working with. I just remember it was not as intuitive as I would have wished.

In my personal experience and opinions QML is the best domain specific language for GUI development I’ve ever used and was a dream to work with in comparison to others. Nowadays, my UIs are mainly react based web applications and I often wish I could use QML instead and dream of a warm future where I can use something like QML on web without any major tradeoffs.

So I strongly disagree with him on this point.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#142

Post by emmanueloga_ »

Yeah no kidding, choosing a GUI framework is pretty difficult task... all of them suck for a different reason :-).

I'm using cljfx these days and really enjoying it. For desktop apps I think it is a great choice [1].

The approach described using Godot could work well depending on the type of app, I think. For instance, this commercial app [2] is built using Kivy [3], which basically draws the controls using sdl+openGL, so a similar kind of setup as the Godot one described in the OP.

1: https://github.com/cljfx/cljfx

2: http://www.yeco.io/

3: https://kivy.org/#gallery

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#143

Post by throwaway43234 »

pierrec wrote: post #59
mhh__ wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!).

If it's general purpose, then I agree that visual languages always seem to be an annoyance. If it's domain-specific, that's another story, since many domains are all about connecting blocks together. The most common use case is audio/video signal processing, where it works well if you're working above a certain level of abstraction.

Indeed, I've had mostly positive experiences with Isadora in the audio/video signal processing visual scripting space.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#144

Post by fit2rule »

I am a big fan of the MOAI toolkit, which is similar to Godot in some ways - inasmuch as its a game engine toolkit with a Lua front-end - and with which I have created a number of 'non-game' GUI apps.

It was easily one of the nicest projects I've ever done - no web stuff to deal with, only MOAI for the core layer, with Hanappe doing the regular work of providing the GUI controls and abstractions I need - scroller views, buttons, sliders, etc.

And since that experience, I really yearn for a similar kind of framework on the better-supported engines out there (MOAI has gotten a bit long in the tooth in the last few years).

Its really quite a neat feeling to ship an app that uses highly optimised game code for its lower interface abstractions, with a mid-layer framework on top of it - which then can be packaged and run on any platform: iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, MacOS - and looks the same, functions the same, on every platform.

It does take some courage however. You do have to make a great UI experience for the end user - if its half-assed or buggy, the whole thing falls down. But, when it works, it works very well and blows away the whole Web framework. I really don't like doing apps any other way these days ..

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#145

Post by jcelerier »

userbinator wrote: post #82
kodablah wrote: 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"...

> 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.

that really depends on the application though. say you want to make a media player, you likely want to embed FFMPEG and that alone will be heavier than windows 3.11 because there are so many codecs today. Likewise for an image editor, you're gonna have to pack a whole lot of image format encoders / decoders.

Also note that Qt can basically run as-is on top of a linux kernel, directly rendering to the framebuffer and doing everything itself so it'll mechanically be a bit heavier than something like wx which uses the OS widget APIs instead.... but won't be able to run in place where there are no "OS widget APIs" (that is, 99.9% of embedded platforms), while Qt has that as a main market.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#146

Post by madshiva »

I was playing with Godot to make application my whole Sunday and then a medium article on HN. This make my day.

I really think too that is really fun, nice to use but I'm facing the same problem with other editor. The applications is quite easy to create but when I want to "share data" between computer, like for exemple making a simple database, It's too complicated. I mean there's no simple task and I don't want that the applications is storing data on the cloud. I could use sqlite, but then I face other problem too.

Anyone could suggest me a better approch regarding this problem?

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#147

Post by jcelerier »

andrewstuart wrote: post #60
coppolaemilio wrote: post #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.

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

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

a lot of visual programming environments, like LabVIEW (1986) or Max/MSP (1985), predate Python and JS by at least a good few years :p

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#148

Post by fit2rule »

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 engine which has no concept about damaged regions

Sorry, just: no. Game engines which don't handle rectangle updates are poorly designed junk.

BTW, most game engines do keep track of regions needing update - its one of the most important aspects of performance tuning, for any app which presents objects on a screen to the user. Usually, the OS is doing this for an app in the apps own context - game engines also do this, and if they don't do it well, they get passed over for better-performing engines.

(Disclaimer: contributor to the MOAI game engine, which does this very, very well, and which is an amazing way to do a UI - for any app..)

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#149

Post by chme »

bscphil wrote: post #101
m3at wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I'd love to see a comparison of a simple application, e.g. a media player in Qt vs Godot using this mode, and see which one drains a laptop battery quicker.

Not sure if media player is the best choice, since playing a video is similar to a game and I guess that most of the battery power goes into decoding and displaying the video not the surrounding gui for play buttons and the like.

I would rather see how they fare with a classic GUI like a text or spreadsheet editor. Maybe for simplicity sake a calculator or an IRC client, then you just have to join an active channel and let it run for a while.

Re: Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot

#150

Post by lewispollard »

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…

Last time I used Godot, the editor itself had a little indicator showing if the editor was redrawing or not (if it was redrawing, a little spinner appeared). And, indeed, if you leave the editor alone with only still elements, it doesn't redraw. I think that's an optional settings now. But if the editor can do that, why not the applications you make in it?
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