amerkoleci / alimer

Cross-platform .NET 8 C# 12 game engine.
https://amerkoleci.github.io/alimer-docs/
MIT License
390 stars 20 forks source link

Foundations to write a 2D GUI library #13

Open nockawa opened 2 years ago

nockawa commented 2 years ago

I'm currently using ImGui.Net with Vortice for the application I'm working one. However, Dear ImGui has several imperfections/limitations that frustrate me.

I've wrote several 2D GUI libs in the past, on the top of a game engine and I would like to consider the effort needed to write one for Vortice. Hopefully you can answer to some of them without me go digging in the source code (lazy of me, but I think it could worth a shot to discuss about this with you).

Text render Do you have anything so far ? Especially toolkit to create SDF based texture of a font and then a shader that displays text using the SDF texture?

Draw call How easy/hard would it be for me to generate draw lists with the common features needed for such project:

If all the foundations are exposed by Vortice, I could consider writing a GUI on the top of it. It certainly wouldnt be a 2022 thing but could definitely be a Q1 2023 one. I have to assess how long it would take to create the thin layer on the top of the GPU stuffs in order for me to write the GUI on the top of it, encapsulating the complexity of the GPU rendering.