nanovg VS imgui

I use nanovg for my projects and it works surprisingly well for its size. It integration is pretty simple .... if you know a little bit of OpenGL, otherwise there is a slight learning curve.

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

It's a library for drawing vector shapes, sort of like SVG - https://github.com/memononen/nanovg The old way in the SDK was with GDI+, but the benefit of a vector format is scalability to higher resolutions and better GPU usage. The workaround potentially costs some frames, but its better than bust panels for now.

If you are a beginner in computer graphics, I strongly suggest you to look at the nanovg library: it contains all the primitives you might want to render (circles, lines, filled polygons, text, images, ...). Integrating it in existing codebase is not that hard, since the library is rather small.

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.

Yes, "immediate" refers just to the API. Source: [1]

[1]: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/About-the-IMGUI-paradi...

I find the imgui UIs to be very high density (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui and the gallery issues) See for example the tracy profiler: https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy. It seems the game dev community has pretty powerful tools to understand and interrogate their work.

The user interface has been entirely developed using immediate mode gui dear-imgui library, with the ImGui.NET wrapper. This allows for a fast and bloat free experience but, at the same time, harder customization for a task of this size, since the library isn't really suited to the development of end-user applications. On the other side, it's what I'm most familiar to work with.

I've recently had a lot of fun/success with Dear ImGui (C++) -- not a game engine, but originally/partly meant for use in them. https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

You can manually transform vertices (call ImGui::ShadeVertsTransformPos) this is what angled headers are using https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/6917

Cool project! Graphics programming is _hard_ and anything to make it easier is welcome.

Maybe a dumb question, but why not Imgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui). "It's way too big and complex" is a completely reasonable answer, but I found it fantastic for debug menus, and there are a few applications that have used it as their _main_ GUI (Ship of Harkinian as an example).