[HN Gopher] Using a game engine to write a GUI to the OpenBSD pa...
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       Using a game engine to write a GUI to the OpenBSD package manager
        
       Author : hucste
       Score  : 74 points
       Date   : 2022-05-06 08:02 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (dataswamp.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (dataswamp.org)
        
       | anthk wrote:
       | Unix was born to play Space War on a machine. Rogue gave us
       | Ncurses.
       | 
       | This is not as odd as you would think. But, well, I'd use Perl
       | and GTK2/3 for that.
       | 
       | Perl is in base, as X. GTK2 is a few ports away. If GTK's
       | dependencies are too much, I'd use Perl/Tk.
        
       | meheleventyone wrote:
       | Godot has become really popular for writing applications because
       | the UI toolkit is absolutely fantastic. Here's a sample just from
       | itch.io:
       | 
       | https://itch.io/c/651672/tools-made-with-godot-engine
        
         | blensor wrote:
         | And the great thing is that they are using their own UI to
         | build the Godot Editor itself.
         | 
         | There is even an alpha build of the editor that runs on Android
         | (and even inside the Oculus Quest).
        
         | greggman3 wrote:
         | I wanted to see if they actually handle text well
         | (https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/) but every one I
         | download to Mac the OS said "This App is damaged and can't be
         | opened"
        
           | meheleventyone wrote:
           | I'd suggest contacting the authors or just downloading Godot
           | itself as all the UI is the same as those people are using.
        
         | jayd16 wrote:
         | What makes it better than others?
        
           | meheleventyone wrote:
           | Layout is almost WYSIWYG and easy to get started with a
           | simple download, resulting binary is small, really easy to
           | integrate with an underlying 2D or 3D scene, lots of
           | controls, built in scripting for simple things, great interop
           | with native code for complex things, can deploy to multiple
           | platforms with one project, everything is open source.
        
         | wrnr wrote:
         | Does the UI toolkit support basic text operations like copy-
         | pasting or selecting text? This is a common problem in the alt-
         | UI scene, basic stuff doesn't work after years of development.
         | I don't want to ship an electron app either but at least it has
         | everything everyone has come to expect.
        
         | maccard wrote:
         | The big thing that this misses is accessibility.
        
           | meheleventyone wrote:
           | There are a few accessibility plugins IIRC but yeah it could
           | be much better in that regard.
        
           | tenken wrote:
           | I'm sure they're accepting Pull Requests.
        
         | pacifika wrote:
         | Strong theming as well https://github.com/tristongilley/Godot-
         | Windows-95-Theme
        
       | alrlroipsp wrote:
       | I mean why not just put Unreal Engine in the boot loader.
        
         | dasz wrote:
         | Perhaps a little later in the boot process perhaps?
         | 
         | Its likely possible. After all, the unreal engine does have at
         | least _some_ rudimentary 3d graphics support.
        
           | maccard wrote:
           | unreal engine is more than just rendering. Like QT, it's a
           | cross platform application toolkit. There's no reason you
           | couldn't port the underlying platform (which is reasonably
           | well abstracted) to something lower level
        
       | aa-jv wrote:
       | I've done something similar, but with JUCE [1] - which is a very
       | amazing framework for building audio software, plugins,
       | synthesizers and things.
       | 
       | I tell you, there are very few things more satisfying than seeing
       | the same high performance C++ codebase running on Windows, Linux,
       | MacOS, iOS and Android .. and the users don't know, don't care,
       | and remain happily oblivious to the fact that none of the
       | controls they are so gleefully slinging around are native. They
       | Just Work(tm). (Including with Accessibility features..)
       | 
       | [1] = http://juce.com/
        
         | nmfisher wrote:
         | I actually came across JUCE the other day for the first time. I
         | was wondering -would it be a really terrible idea to make a
         | general purpose cross-platform GUI with this?
        
           | royjacobs wrote:
           | Why would it be terrible? JUCE is meant to write general
           | purpose cross-platform GUIs with.
           | 
           | It has a focus on audio because that's its niche and where it
           | originally came from, but it's fine to use it for general
           | purpose stuff. Is that what you mean?
        
             | nmfisher wrote:
             | Basically, yes. I came across a few comments that suggested
             | it was great for audio UIs, but very unwieldy for anything
             | outside that (things like non-Latin text rendering,
             | navigation stacks, etc). So while it was possible to build
             | general UIs in JUCE, you needed to go to a lot of effort
             | (at least compared to something like Qt/Flutter/etc).
             | 
             | Admittedly I didn't dig really deep so I don't know how
             | valid these criticisms are - so I was wondering if you had
             | some tales from the trenches and how it stacks up against
             | "less niche" UI kits.
        
               | royjacobs wrote:
               | I'm afraid I only used it for some toy applications and
               | it was mostly fine, but I do concur that if you're going
               | for a 'just a bunch of forms' desktop application you'll
               | find more out-of-the-box features in something like Qt.
               | 
               | If, however, your application mostly consists out of
               | custom GUI elements then JUCE is pretty compelling.
        
               | nmfisher wrote:
               | Thanks!
        
       | chrisMyzel wrote:
       | Interesting discussion. Trying to get to render high performance
       | graphs in the browser and it's a chore to find good libraries.
       | 
       | Found this article about advanced GUIs with godot
       | https://medium.com/swlh/what-makes-godot-engine-great-for-ad...
        
       | PostThisTooFast wrote:
        
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