This just makes me yearn for a UI-centric minimal compilation mode for Godot. It's such an enticing target for GPU-rendered UI, and there are even some excellent libraries and plugins out there for making components that are useful in engineering or data analysis!
Not familiar with godot, but the GUI reminds me a lot of the blender GUI. I always wondered if the devs would ever spin out that GUI so that it became a library, because it always felt blazingly fast compared to e.g. Qt or GTK
Completely agreed! I've been meaning to write a blog post on using Godot to professionally create cross-platform applications (and probably will soon). The short of it is that Godot is fantastic as a UI builder, and I think a lot of people are slowly realizing it. Many professional applications have been built with Godot[0] , and I also want to give a shoutout to Lorien[1] which is my favorite whiteboard application also made in Godot, and what partially inspired this whole project.
Godot isn't perfect of course, and there are some things that many other UI creating tools do better, but I think there's a lot of untapped potential here.
There seems to be some people writing UI applications with the Godot game engine. Given the dismal state of desktop UI frameworks/tools, this seem to make more and more sense (very light binaries, solid cross-platform support, a WYSIWYG toolkit with good scripting functionality, a high-performance 2D renderer, access to C/C++ if you wan to go low-level, you name it.)
Thank you for making this! I’ve been dissatisfied with the options available for making local GUIs and curious about what could be done with game engines. What was it like working with the UI layer of Godot?
It's perfectly reasonable to build a game engine that's possible to build these GUI-specific systems on top of (if you want lazy UI rendering simply don't call the update. For godot I believe the biggest block is the editor cuz it's geared towards game creation (haven't used godot for a while don't know anything about its usage without editor)
The more serious my Godot projects became, the more I became aware of the limitations. Even something as simple as an outline shader for a 3D object can only be implemented in a relatively hacky way.
Nonetheless, I love using it. I'm a huge fan of Godot and donate to them every year. The fact the entire engine is a 30mb download is truely amazing. The editor is snappy and is a breath of fresh air in the world of bloated electron apps
I've heard people using the Godot Engine to make complex UI applications. So I've tried myself writing a simple app (it required multiple windows support which was added in Godot 4 beta), and the experience was really solid. It has its own slot/signal system like Qt but because it's much more well integrated into the language/editor. The node system in Godot is similar to the DOM, and editing layout was much easier than expected. (Compared to Unity's UI system which was built on top of a component system and is more finicky to use because of this. And no and I don't want to talk about UIElements, it's unfinished and unusable in its current state). And most important you don't need to wait for C++/MOC compiler to build, because of the scripting langauge (GDScript) changes can be tested instantaneously.
Unreal Engine might be a bit overkill since it has too many dependencies built in (you don't need a state-of-the-art 3D renderer and physics engine for UI). Godot is much more lightweight than that (about 40~50 MB from my tests, at least better than Electron), but some might still think that's too much though.
Oh how I wish “Godot as a Library” was a thing in the same way that Unity may be embedded into another project. Dealing with Unity as our AR runtime has not been great.
It's the use case that requires the bare minimum functionality. Godot might require more recent lower-level APIs than the other GUI toolkits, but if the use cases are similar, then it wouldn't require more performance out of them than the other GUI toolkits would. Using software-based implementations of those APIs would more than likely be sufficient, meaning that there's no dependence on any specific class of GPU.
I suppose this was inevitable given Godot’s editor and engine are a single binary, and it already supports WebAssembly as a target. The future is exciting!
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