this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
87 points (96.8% liked)

Godot

5907 readers
1 users here now

Welcome to the programming.dev Godot community!

This is a place where you can discuss about anything relating to the Godot game engine. Feel free to ask questions, post tutorials, show off your godot game, etc.

Make sure to follow the Godot CoC while chatting

We have a matrix room that can be used for chatting with other members of the community here

Links

Other Communities

Rules

We have a four strike system in this community where you get warned the first time you break a rule, then given a week ban, then given a year ban, then a permanent ban. Certain actions may bypass this and go straight to permanent ban if severe enough and done with malicious intent

Wormhole

[email protected]

Credits

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Long overdue post on the potential for using Godot for GUI app development and why I think it's pretty cool!

top 9 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 28 points 8 months ago (1 children)

GDScript is also a very easy language to use which is great for UI/UX devs, and a lot nicer than the popular alternatives like Javascript or (god forbid) Python.

wat

[–] popcar2 13 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Just my personal hot take haha, had nothing but bad experiences with Python.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I do a lot of python development and I agree.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's funny though because GDScript is based loosely on python.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Not very loosely; if you know Python you'll pick up GDScript in an hour or two.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

That's a pretty hot take ... Especially preferring the absolute madness that is JavaScript to Python.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

I use Godot when I don't want a forms GUI, but still need a GUI on my C# application.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Cool, I may have to mess around with Godot’s UI system.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I don't think I agree with your conclusions, but I think it's a very interesting perspective/it's good out of the box thinking.

It's not particularly hard to create animated UIs using CSS + React/Vue/Angular or QML (i.e. the Qt that was meant for animation). For me as a former web developer, I think Vue with CSS would be the easiest. If I spent a bit more time with QML, I imagine I'd catch up pretty quickly on that as well (the only GUI app I'm currently maintaining if a Qt Widgets app that really is more practical than pretty).

Now, maybe Godot does just make some parts of this a lot easier. I don't know, I have basically no experience with its GUI system (and only a little bit of experience with it at all with a toy game)... I just worry a bit you're drawing conclusions based on what you're already comfortable with vs a more fair comparison.

I will definitely say, I agree the Godot runtime is going to be a lot more lightweight than web. I'll also add, if you're not doing a traditional app where you use lots of prebuilt widgets, accessibility is going to take work regardless of what you go with.

Arguably part of why user interfaces aren't as flashy isn't so much the tech but ... it's not trendy at the moment and it makes accessibility that much harder. Lots of folks want their grocery store app to just work, not to do some flashy shopping cart skit on page load. Lots of flash apps were just plain annoying to interact with.

The GDExtension stuff reminds me of implementing QML types in C++ to access a "real language"/break free of the limitations of QML and its JavaScript runtime.

The node system sounds a lot like just building out components. If you're using any of the frameworks I just mentioned with a giant state singleton, you're way off the rails/not using the framework properly.