What GUI editor are y'all using?

[addison]

Hey, I've been getting my feet wet with Irrlicht for the past couple of weeks and I was wondering whether anyone could recommend a GUI editor. So far I've tried:

• The stock GUIEditor.exe that ships with the library - Changing the skin causes the font size to shrink to an unreadable size. This is fine as long as I just don't do that, but I wanted to explore other options.

• NerpaGUI - I gave up trying to finagle this into compiling against Irrlicht 1.8.5.

What tools are you using to edit Irrlicht GUIs in The Year of Our Lord 2023?

[CuteAlien]

Currently I tend to hardcode my dialogs in c++. Which sucks for quick design and only works because I do both, code and design. Tiny advantage - it makes me less reluctant to do stuff which is a bit tricky to do with gui editors like ui elements changing or hiding depending on state. And hack in things like DPI dependent resizing (aka scaling all rectangles when creating UI elements by DPI factors and re-create the UI on dpi changing events). Thought I suppose I could to DPI stuff also with other solutions.

In an older game I had used my own simplified xml serialization which only had parameters my designer wanted. And allowed to create some templates for default options for groups, like all buttons using certain settings, which then got overwritten per element. And then I added a key in game to reload dialogs. The editing itself was directly in XML. Not super flexible maybe, but was surprisingly fast to edit. Thought I did miss an easy way to add constants that way (could probably have coded it...).

Bit work to setup, badly documented and likely also doesn't work with recenty Irrlicht anymore, but if you want to take a look: https://github.com/mzeilfelder/hc1/tree/master/src - check for the gui_dialog.cpp/.h. Code using those dialogs in the gui_dialogs subfolder. The xml's in another repository at: https://github.com/mzeilfelder/media_hc ... r/media/ui

If I had to code that one again I might do it different this time. One of the main reasons I used custom xml's back then was that back then Irrlicht xml serialization required to have all parameters for every element. Which made for super fat files. With current Irrlicht trunk that's no longer the case as ui elements now simply keep their current values if anything is not mentioned in the xml. So a similar solution could likely be coded a lot easier these days.

Sadly I could never warm up to the GUI editor. How did you change the skin in that one? I just looked if I can reproduce your problem (sounds like a bug), but no clue right now - can you load a skin xml or something?

[n00bc0de]

I have been using wxWidgets with irrlicht to build my level editor and I have been using wxFormBuilder as the gui editor. Its really easy to use and it can generate code for multiple languages. If you search for wxIrrlicht on this forum you will find a project to bind irrlicht to wxWidgets. However, I had to make some changes to get it to work with modern wxWidgets so you might want to pull wxIrrlicht.cpp and wxIrrlicht.h from my old repo here: https://github.com/n00b87/OutOfSpace3D/tree/main

NOTE: Since wxWidgets is managing the window, it is also handling all the input events so this is only if you just want to use irrlicht for rendering and do everything else in wxWidgets.