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With IMGUI there is nothing like that, which usually mean you need to write your own, and it causes huge slow down early on. For example, by just using Qt framework you get QDir or QFileInfo out of box. IMGUIs traditionally don't have that part, and represent only widgets itself. When using Qt and similar frameworks there is a lot of utilities that come with it, but are unrelated to GUI widgets itself. Before I never considered it seriously for GameDev tools like world editor. Most of use cases were for debugging or tweaking parameters in simple examples.
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I used IMGUI style widgets for a long time. Their postmortem explains in details why using web tech is bad if you only have C++ programmers working on it. I shipped one game for NaCl, and that worked pretty well, but NaCl didn't really take of. ) At the time I was hopping Native Client (NaCl) would take of and it would be fine to write tools in C++ and run them inside Web Browser. To be honest, I think this about any interpreted code. But Java Script always looked jenky to me for anything serious. I was curious when Insomniac announced their switch to web tech for tools. I never used Web Browser for building tools. I'm gonna keep writing tools UI in bold, because there will be always someone to ask what about game UI (it's NOT part of consideration here).įor gullible: Unity is doing it, they all the rage now, they make $$$, obviously you can attribute all of their success to decision to use IMGUI, End Of Discussion. I don't think those should be unified since constraints and requirements are completely different. This is post only about tools UI, not game UI. When I say IMGUI, I mean dear-imgui since it's most popular one, but it could apply to any IMGUI library. When I say Qt below, I mean any traditional GUI library, like wxWidgets, WPF, etc. This post is not direct answer to Andreas, nor critique of their decision to use Qt, just my opinion why I think IMGUI is more suitable for GameDev tools. All my experience with Qt is pre-version 5.0, but I don't think much changed about C++ side since they were focused to mobile and declarative UI side of things. There is really nothing I dislike about it (not even moc'ing). I used extensively Qt in the past, I consider it to be one of the best designed C++ project, their documentation is amazing, there is huge community, etc. The last link is not related to anything below but it's part of discussion above, putting it here just for people who are interested to see all opinions. If you know what IMGUI is, for context read following presentations and blog posts: If you're curious about IMGUI see bottom of this post, otherwise continue whatever you were doing, this post it's not for you. Why I think Immediate Mode GUI is way to go for GameDev tools Prerequisitesīefore you continue, if you don't know what IMGUI is don't bother reading this post, just ignore it, don't write anything in comments section, etc.