3 ms·

I am a bit skeptical about this. I feel like game UI toolkit and desktop GUI framework live in two separate world with different expectation. At least, in my hu

by maeln 3y ago

I am a bit skeptical about this. I feel like game UI toolkit and desktop GUI framework live in two separate world with different expectation. At least, in my humble experience, having to have used both in my career. GTK/Qt are usually good/very good with their integration with the OS, accessibility feature, keyboard navigation, handling of features like copy/paste, ... These are the kinds of things that game ui toolkit tend to completely forgo since they don't need it, and focus instead on performance, theming, integration with a game engine, ... Theoretically, you could say that the renderer is agnostic with this, but in practice, it is not completely true. And also with the simple fact that you have a limited budget to work on feature, and they both rather work on different feature. Having a very fast and accurate renderer is just not as important for desktop GUI framework than for game UI toolkits.

bsder 3y ago
Text is the sine qua non of GUIs. Text is also the bane of renderers--there is a reason why we have exactly 3 text shaping engines--Windows, Apple, Harfbuzz. Text is a beast to deal with and is often ill-specified. Text is also the bane of GPUs--we don't have good GPU-only algorithms for taking a string of text, handing that to the GPU, and having the GPU render that directly to a buffer. Text is also something that games suck at rendering. SDF (signed distance fields) are considered a good rendering of text in the 3D world and they are blurry as hell. I do think that the modern GUI world is going in a lot of wrong directions, but you must deal with text accurately to call yourself a real GUI.