GUI libraries...

[slime]

There are currently no decent GUI libraries available to use, as far as I can tell; goo is incomplete and buggy, RPG's lQuery thing is incomplete and has odd hardcoded russian bitmap fonts, and LoveUI hasn't even been updated for LÖVE 0.7.0.

Hardcoding a custom UI or menu system is a pain, especially considering LÖVE is often used in competitions like Ludum Dares and Game Jams where every minute spent mashing your keyboard and producing crappy low-level menus is a minute taken away from creating the game's actual content.
There have been a lot of libraries and helper functions showing up in the Projects and Demos section lately, but not much that's UI-related. I would make one myself, but I've already committed myself to a whole bunch of other projects over the summer.


tl;dr I feel like LÖVE is in need of a solid UI library. Is anyone willing to take on this challenge? Maybe some sort of existing (non-LÖVE) one could be integrated into the LÖVE source code...

[Robin]

An important problem is that around here, GUI libraries are more often made than used, so people in general just sort of stopped making them, because they knew it wouldn't be used anyway.

[nevon]

I would love to have a proper GUI lib, but it is quite a huge task to build one that is both complete and that works well.

How well does Goo work? If its foundation is solid, perhaps it should be adopted as a community project, brought up-to-date and built upon.

[BlackBulletIV]

Yeah, there isn't anything really decent out there for GUI. From what I can see, Goo is the best, but to be honest, I find it messy, incredibly so with the internal code. I wrote my own simple GUI, but it's extremely basic, under-tested, and requires the framework itself.

But yeah, I'd personally love to see a cleanly and solidly implemented GUI library.

[vrld]

What do you need a gui library to have?
My list is rather short: Buttons and text input. Maybe a slider. Something like a message box would be neat, but is easy enough to do yourself by hijacking love.draw/love.update and using a button.
What I don't need: A window system, containers and automatic layouts, drop down lists, list boxes, check boxes, multi-line input and labels.

[nevon]

What do you need a gui library to have?
My list is rather short: Buttons and text input. Maybe a slider. Something like a message box would be neat, but is easy enough to do yourself by hijacking love.draw/love.update and using a button.
What I don't need: A window system, containers and automatic layouts, drop down lists, list boxes, check boxes, multi-line input and labels.

What I need:

• Buttons
• Text input
• Comboboxes
• Radiobuttons
• Sliders

What I would like to have:

• Tabs

There may be other things that I've forgotten, but those are the main things I would need/like to have.

[RPG]

lQuery is a framework for objects and events management. I tried to create GUI based on lQuery (it's easier, than GUI based on pure LOVE), but my attempt is not very successful.
lQuery also not yet finished, because API changes very often. Keyboard events and wheel events was added. Also I just have no time to write documentation:) Nevertheless, lQuery successfully tested in the development of a real game.

Perhaps in the future I will be able to create a GUI system for love / scrupp, as lQuery works in scrupp, and in love. I'm trying to create a user-friendly API for GUI development. Once I create API I'll need to create widgets, and it is a very laborious process.

[BlackBulletIV]

What I need:

• Buttons
• Text input
• Comboboxes
• Radiobuttons
• Sliders

For me, it's those and panels. Colour pickers would be useful, but with those controls it shouldn't be too hard to build one yourself.

[Ensayia]

I think what people ultimately desire is something lightweight, not really feature rich or complex, that can be tossed into a simple game. Something like this would be great for doing an option menu or start screen. This would be nice for short challenges like LD where you may not want or need a full blown UI.

On the other hand, people are going to want their own styles and features in a GUI library and it will be hard to please everyone. There are already a few GUI libraries available on the wiki but I guess they aren't for everyone.

[tentus]

What I Need:
- Elegant menu source
- Buttons
- Text Input

What Would Be Nice:
- Checkboxes
- Sliders

What Would Be Really Nice:
- Radio Buttons
- Confirmation Popups


The menu system I made in Kurosuke was clunky and a pain to work in, sofaras sticking actual options into it. My biggest requirement would be an elegant structure to the menus themselves: it is a pain to write 300 lines of lua that just give the player some basic options.