imgui VS WPF

I'm not familiar with it myself, but Dear ImGui comes up a lot in this situation due to it being able to integrate with SDL and other platforms.

We use a lot of software used by big companies. :) Git and C++ come to mind. But as far I see on their software list there are one or two roguelikes. Also, bgfx uses ImGUI under the hood, so it is a good place to see how it can look or even use it instead of just ImGUI.

The gui is actually imgui. I've used the .net bindings from ImGui.NET (integrated in the rendering pipeline with Silk.NET.OpenGL.Extensions.ImGui).

Dear ImGui does have an ImDrawList API which can scratch the creative programming itch very well.

Use https://github.com/jkuhlmann/cgltf to parse the files. https://github.com/ocornut/imgui for your UI. Maybe https://www.libsdl.org/ just to set up a window, handle mouse clicks and initialize the GL context in that window.

ImGui is mainly used for debug rendering, but if you browse the screenshot threads, there quite a few 'end user applications' among them:

https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/5886

To go multiplatform with OpenGL / Vulkan (harder for a beginner) you can use a simple window library like GLFW and Dear ImGui for UI. I use these for Avoyd, along with a few other libraries.

Cher ImGui

A few examples: Dear ImGui, SFML, FLTK. Probably even Tk could be used.

WPF is definitely not dead. It may not be the latest shiny thing, but it works, it is maintained (judging by https://github.com/dotnet/wpf or https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/wpf-on-dotnet-7/), and it is fully and officially supported on the modern .NET platform.

Feature: new WPF style for Windows 10

Okay apparently someone got it working with a simple patch: https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/issues/688

WPF is not abandoned (the last commit to its repo was today).

WPF (UI framework built on top of Direct3D): open (last commit: 2 days ago), still supported WinUI 1 (UI framework built on top of Direct3D): proprietary, supported until Jan 10 2023 WinUI 2 (UI framework built on top of Direct3D): open (last commit: 2 days ago), still supported WinUI 3 (UI framework build on top of Platform Uno): open (couldn't find v3 branch or repo), not yet released

C# is entirely cross-platform; there is nothing in the language that is Windows or VS specific. However, some .NET Framework libraries are not all cross-platform. One pain point in .NET (not Framework) is that WPF applications only run on Windows

https://github.com/dotnet/wpf/blob/main/src/Microsoft.DotNet.Wpf/src/WindowsBase/System/Windows/Threading/DispatcherSynchronizationContext.cs may help

Also, the runtime that C# runs on, is also completely open source as well (https://github.com/dotnet/runtime); ASP.NET which is used to create web apps in C# is open as well (https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore). WinForms/WPF, used to make desktop apps in C# is also open source (https://github.com/dotnet/wpf, https://github.com/dotnet/winforms). All of the source code for these are on the dotnet Github page: https://github.com/dotnet and most are all MIT-licensed.