This area is where I have tons of problems. I’m trying to render a texture2d game map which is grid based and have a floating tooltip box that displays information about the cell hovered. Also the texture area should be scrollable within its parent window, the window could have more controls in it.
Also, a docking system isn’t very good in the C# library library. I also have no idea how to preemptively set up the GUI system for an in game editor. It’s just too much work to figure it out if you don’t already know it like you obviously do.
When you know how to do things in ImGUI, you can do them. If you don’t know, you have to decipher C++ code and read through forum posts that all have access to the features hidden behind the ImGUI C# integration library, so you can’t tweak things the way you want or enable new things added to the library.
Again, it’s just too much friction for a hobby game dev.
I do think Noesis is awesome, and EmptyKeys is awesome too, it just needs some more love. Having binding/commanding systems is awesome and separating UI from code is a huge win for tweaking things without breaking things.
Just because I like, no, love a library doesn’t make me an employee. You sound like you have some weird hate towards Noesis. If I was an employee pushing for my product to be used, what is the problem with that? Don’t you think you’ve made an amazing game in Wayward Terran Frontier and want people to play it? Would you promote it to people in a forum about games?
When I promote WTF I do it as a dev, not as “hey guys, I am this completely independent person and I am saying WTF is awesome, zero bias guaranteed” (on not so relevant note, I am not sure when was the last time I’ve promoted WTF in any way). What I find weird is the whole context of what you are doing and how you are doing it. Bringing commercial gui framework to opensource game framework when saying it will become “go to for MG devs”? Come on…
About your problem: Texture area is render target, all you need for interaction is to get relative mouse position to canvas and then you find mouse hovered object as usual.
I do not believe that this particular task is in any way easier in Noesis. Anyway, what I find absurd here is that there is, as you said, existing c# wrapper for Noesis, so at that point why push it further. It’s easy to use, ey? I have hate towards shady stuff and pushing Noesis over Imgui for ease of use out of all things? That’s absurd in my book. Maybe if you would at least go with recommending Noesis but for a tool/editor over ImGui? Nope.
I’m a bit late to the party but here’s my GUI framework:
Open source, MIT license, supports box model, has a ton of controls. I’ve seen some frameworks only have the common stuff like buttons, checkboxes, textblocks etc but mine has a lot more than that. Heavily inspired by WPF so you’re intended to use it with a hierarchically defined UI so the layout engine can arrange everything for you, but if you really wanted you can still use absolute positions (by just dumping all your controls into an MGOverlayPanel with specific offsets for each one). If on Windows, it’s also able to parse a limited form of XAML markup. Like if you did this:
<Window SizeToContent="WidthAndHeight" MinWidth="200" MinHeight="100" Padding="16,12">
<Window.TitleBarTextBlock>
<TextBlock FontSize="9" Foreground="White" Text="An [b]MGWindow[/b] with a single [b]MGButton[/b]: [color=yellow]Click it![/color]" />
</Window.TitleBarTextBlock>
<StackPanel Orientation="Vertical" Spacing="10">
<TextBlock FontSize="12" Text="Window Sample" HorizontalAlignment="Center" />
<Button Name="Button1" Content="Click me" BorderBrush="Gray" BorderThickness="2" Padding="5" />
</StackPanel>
</Window>
Then subscribe to the button’s event handler in your c# code:
Window1.GetElementByName<MGButton>("Button1")
.AddCommandHandler((btn, e) => { btn.SetContent("I've been clicked!"); });
Would result in a window like this:
You can use textures to fill things like borders or backgrounds so I’ve no doubt a motivated person with the right assets could make a pretty UI with the framework.
And just about everything is customizable. For example if you make a checkbox, you can override the style of the button part (where the check mark is shown) to make it look however you want. Hell you could even set the checkbox’s CheckMarkColor to Transparent, and subscribe to MGElement.OnEndDraw event to then render your own completely custom check mark.
Can the back-end be re-targeted? I’ve been experimenting with using SDL2 directly.
What do you think it would take to get the fonts looking smooth like we see in web browsers? Often, the fonts I see in MonoGame and other game frameworks are pretty rough with either heavy pixelation and/or kerning issues.
Note that the two character prefix on classes is a bit strange for .NET. The normal thing is to use plain names (“Button” rather than “MGButton”) and then let the user make use of C# if they in fact want a prefix:
I don’t know much of anything about other backends but the bulk of the drawing logic is funneled through MGUI/DrawTransaction.cs at master · Videogamers0/MGUI · GitHub . There’s also a dependency on MonoGame.Extended. Mostly for a few simple structs like RectangleF, Thickness, and Size, and some drawing stuff like MonoGame.Extended’s PrimitiveBatch or filling solid polygons and circles, nothing too major.
Tu peux me trouver dans celui officiel de Monogame sous