nanovg VS imgui

The "engine" is built on top of amazing https://www.lwjgl.org/ and https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx/, and UI system is baked by https://github.com/memononen/nanovg and https://github.com/facebook/yoga

NanoVG is the closest thing I came across when I had a similar quesiton: https://github.com/memononen/NanoVG

unfortunately it doesn't seem like it's getting steady updates now unlike the last time I checked. But I imagine it's pretty mature at this point. There also seem to be ports in Metal/DX11 if you didn't want to be stuck in OpenGL.

Also there's NanoVG if you really want a vector api in C, but don't need anti-aliased clipping.

Getting sufficient antialiasing quality for 2D graphics is difficult on GPUs. https://github.com/memononen/nanovg accomplishes this with GL2/GLES2 level hardware for most of the stuff one would want to render as part of a GUI. My project https://github.com/styluslabs/nanovgXC supports rendering arbitrary paths with exact coverage antialiasing, but requires GLES3.1 or GL4 level hardware for reasonable performance.

> to learn the 'nuts and bolts' of rendering

These nuts and bolts are very different between CPU and GPU. CPU-based libraries are painting pixels in bitmaps in system memory. Most GPU-based libraries are uploading indexed triangle meshes, and rendering them with weird shaders.

Worse, there're no good open source implementations of GPU-based ones. Microsoft ships an implementation as a part of OS (Direct2D) but it's not open source. Linux simply doesn't have an equivalent.

At least for initial versions, consider C interop with this https://github.com/memononen/nanovg It cuts a few corners (no cleartype for text, CPU overhead for repeated rendering of same static paths) but it's still good overall, simple, and easy to use.

> My only concern with C# is the cross compatibility

Works well on Linux, Windows and OSX, including ARM CPUs. Not sure about Android and iOS, never tested.

My largest concern with C# would be performance. Technically the language allows to code in any style, but most guides and examples are using OO-heavy one.

In fact, if using a modern graphics pipeline with shaders, you will actually have to learn how to draw a single rectangle to your screen, and then use that knowledge to draw (anti-aliased) lines, rectangles, arcs, circles, ellipses, etc. too. For instance, have a look at https://www.cairographics.org/ https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear https://github.com/memononen/nanovg and https://github.com/nical/lyon. There are probably also tutorials on how to draw vectorized graphics using OpenGL, Vulkan, etc.

What is your take on the underlying library NanoVG stating

In terms of other people's projects: stb, microui, and nanovg come to mind

My library uses nanovg, a canvas API on top of OpenGL, written in C and stb_truetype for font rasterization.

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.