LearnOpenGL VS imgui

Hi every one ! This is my first post on dev.to so a new experience for me! I'm actually working on a Minecraft clone for my engine dev portfolio, and I've decided to share with you the steps of my journey 😁 This post is intended for people who have a basic understanding of 3D rendering. If that's not the case, I highly recommend you take a look at this website, which is an absolute reference! For your information, I am working on Fedora Linux 44, with a RTX 3060Ti, 32GB of DDR4 3600MHz and a Ryzen 7 5700X. Well, let's dive into !

and shoutout to https://learnopengl.com

Learning OpenGL. https://gamemath.com/ is free and a great way of explaining most of the math in an intuitive way without getting handwavy or imprecise. https://learnopengl.com/ is also free!

At the end of the day, it's all just maths and physics.

You didn't specifically ask about game development, but that domain is where the majority of graphics, mathematics, lighting, physics, etc, knowledge is distributed. And it can be difficult to find information solely about (e.g.) cloth simulation and other niche topics without it being coupled into game development resources.

I happened to read https://alextardif.com/LearningGraphics.html today, which might give you some pointers in various directions. https://learnopengl.com/ gets a consistently good rap, even today when there are newer APIs like Vulkan and Metal. Consider the API as 5% of the problem to solve though (less tbh, though Vulkan is proving even heavier than I was warned).

If you don't want to learn C/C++, I understand there's a large community around WebGL, so finding their subreddits and other forums could be a good starting point too.

However, again, the API and platform is really just a wrapper around the actual physics simulation (the impressive part).

Learn OpenGL - A free OpenGL tutorial suitable for learners looking to deepen their understanding of graphics APIs, visit http://learnopengl.com.

Me and a friend build our own Graphics engines based on https://learnopengl.com I can highly recommend this to everyone who gets started with computer graphics. It is a lot of new information but not the most modern Graphics library, but the information will help you understand the field and pickup any other graphics library quicker. Once I had a small project up and running I started looking at https://emscripten.org/ to combine it with some web experiments and more easily share my work with other over the web. I also started looking at https://vulkan-tutorial.com/ and https://webgpufundamentals.org/ to experiment with geometry shaders.

Next to Realtime Graphics you could also dabble into the world of Ray-Tracing. Personally I'm still quite new to this field but my master thesis supervisor also gave lectures at an other university where they recoded a lot of lectures during Covid. Advanced Computer graphics at the UU for example https://ics-websites.science.uu.nl/docs/vakken/magr/2021-202... The course recommends https://raytracing.github.io/ as a resource to students, and I can also recommend this.

As a small note to end with, the website(s) of professors giving computer graphics are a true tressure trove of information: https://jacco.ompf2.com/ https://www.3dgep.com/cpp-fast-track-1-getting-started/

Somewhat related, I'm trying to convert the Learn OpenGL tutorials [0] to LÖVR [1]. The main goal is to understand the changes needed to convert the Open GL shaders to the LÖVR version, as there are some changes.

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[0]: https://learnopengl.com/

[1]: https://github.com/wolf81/lovr-learnopengl

Wvhile browsing over the net, one website stands out learnopengl.com. It looks very well-structured, have covered a variety of different topics and have links to the source code. And that is not only about the code, but building an important understanding what is going on behind those lines. I'm pretty sure I will go over the articles over and over again to refresh certain aspects when I actually need them.

I've been vibe coding some music tools and after some researching let Claude get going with imgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui) to build a tool I use for local authoring. It's pretty pixel-dense and looks alright to me. It runs on MacOS and Linux, which is enough for my needs now. Claude has been pretty decent at getting audio stuff going on MacOS and can even tap into various accelerators in MacOS libraries. It's had no problems loading and playing mp3s and m4as, which is the majority of my collection. I'll probably prototype an music manager off of that. It'd be great if it works out for Android as well.

My take is that GUI frameworks/APIs have abandoned power users.

Yes, there are thing like https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, and some (especially open source) applications try and muddle a long with Qt or GTK, but many (most?) serious professional or power user applications have built their own GUI frameworks or at least custom controls to deal with this.

Whatever route you take, as a dev it's painful, especially for someone who remembers adding a couple of libraries to a Delphi project back in the Office 2000s era and getting full docking, configurable toolbars, etc. with little to no work.

So the easy fallback (especially with the recent proliferation of libraries) is TUI and CLI applications with the layout/docking and tabs provided by the terminal emulator itself or one of tmux/zellij/etc.

I've been thinking on and off for a few years now about the idea of a "graphical terminal", sitting somewhere between a GUI toolkit and a terminal emulator and a full blown OS for building inter-composable apps and tools and components that could replace TUI based workflows/apps/layouts. I have a vision of every "pro" app just being a different curation and configuration of underlying components rather than actually separate software.

I read that article a while ago and highly enjoyed it. C# truly has become a very good language for game development and since NativeAOT has become a thing, we will less and less rely on hacks like IL2CPP or BRUTE which transpile the C# IL to C++ such that it can run on JIT restricted platforms like consoles or iOS.

I'd really love to go all-in with C# and SDL3 to make an engine-less cross-platform game but I still miss a good way to make complex game UIs without doing everything from scratch. Does anyone have a good suggestion for making non-trivial game UIs without using a full game engine? So far, I only found https://github.com/vchelaru/Gum and https://github.com/mikke89/RmlUi but I think there's not really something super mature and feature packed, or is there? I'm aware of https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, as the article also mentioned, but that's more for debug UIs, right?

What you see in the demo below is ClojureScript UIx app driving native window with ImGui UI via custom React reconciler. Both hot-reloading and REPL-driven development are supported, as you'd expect it from a typical ClojureScript project.

This is based on the Dear ImGui library/framework [0]. It's not intended, strictly speaking, for standard desktop applications. It's intended for applications that use 3d rendering, like games or CAD.

Although you could certainly use it as a desktop editor if you wanted to, I think the real value is in embedding.

[0] https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

Amazing for designing GUI applications, thanks to Qt, Dear ImGui, and many more.

Within game development it's Dear ImGui. https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

Normally with the Windows DX12 backend, sometimes with the SDL+OpenGL backend if you want cross platform support.

Other frameworks are sort of disappearing. C++ all the way although some use it with C#.

Immediate mode UI toolkits are designed for pluggable backends, some even can discover the appropriate backend at runtime. If you're writing a game, you're expected to (and actually, you must) build your own integration.

ImGUI and Nuklear each have 20+ backends in their repos: <https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/tree/master/backends> <https://github.com/Immediate-Mode-UI/Nuklear/tree/master/dem...>