zui

I am glad people are working on it!! Have you seen Kha by any chance? It has similar goals. I find it quite awesome, but it won't gain mass adoption for a bunch of reasons. https://github.com/Kode/Kha Someone built an immediate mode renderer on top https://github.com/armory3d/zui, which is utilised by ArmorPaint https://armorpaint.org. I also use Zui for my own bespoke 2D game engine. I find this tech and tooling really quite amazing (just look at how little source code Zui has) given just how small the ecosystem around it is. I think Kha really illustrates what can be achievable if the lower levels have robust but simple APIs, just exposing the bare minimum as a standard for others to build upon. It really suggest taking a look at the graphics2 (2d canvas like) api. For the kind of project I work on (mostly 2d games), I think it would re

Also, for even things like physics there are many simple ways to do things. Take Towerfall's arcade physics for example[1]. In under 100 lines you can create the basis for your platformer game. Sure, it's not just pluggable into other pre-existing solutions, ie tile maps, but at least you aren't endlessly hacking all over the place to tweak Unity's physics into submission to get the controls feeling right for your simple 2d game. There is a massive wealth of gamedev knowledge that doesn't seem utilised to its potential because existing engines want sell their pre-canned solutions. I think what the gamedev scene needs are more tools like LDTK[2], with more thought given to how such tools could interop, and a better selection of low level rendering libraries (like Monogame and Raylib) with very robust cross platform support and dead simple

The immediate mode UI library (ZUI) that the developer created, and which ArmorPaint is built on, is also really good. I don’t think Kha or ZUI get enough recognition, and I find both of them extremely elegant and pleasant to use. It might also be surprising to know that besides a few files for specifying constants and enums, ZUI is a single file library with only around 2100 lines of code. https://github.com/armory3d/zui https://github.com/Kode/Kha

I use Zui with Kha/Haxe - an immediate mode GUI library. I cannot overstate how immediate mode GUI greatly simplifies ui development. React is massive step up from OOP/scenegraph/display list style gui, but it is still so complex and cumbersome compared to immediate mode. I can’t fathom why there is such little exploration in this space and it seems mostly limited to gamedev. https://github.com/armory3d/zui

+1 for Kha. I have been getting crazy good performance with the WebGL target. I also much prefer its immediate mode API, as apposed to Heaps’s display list (or scene graph). I was also able to build out a full editor with this fantastic library https://github.com/armory3d/zui