[781]

I didn't say that it's not possible to solve these problems in a retained GUI, just that existing ones, QT, Win32, WPF have these problems.

And since writing a full retained GUI is not exactly trivial, people just wrote mini-GUIs using immediate mode.

When I talked about retained mode APIs, I was thinking about scene graphs, where you say "addMesh" or "addSphere" and then just call "renderFrame". I'm aware that most game engines implement their own scene graph anyway, but it's game specific, not some generic one provided by the OpenGL/DX API.

[invokestatic]

Sorry if I misinterpreted your post but I don't think that changes my response much.

You can absolutely use Win32 Forms and WPF (and probably Qt) with a game. They can be overlaid on top of a DirectX or OpenGL window (with a transparent background) -- I've done it before! I don't think it would have any of the downsides you mentioned, either, except that it wouldn't be GPU accelerated or actually rendered inside the graphics context, which is why nobody actually does this in practice.

But that ignores the dozens of GUI middleware specifically designed for games. A cursory Google search reveals that most of these are going to be retained mode. There's a reason for that. Projects like ImGUI appeal to mostly indie devs who don't have the time or resources to write their own GUI library or license some third-party middleware. And it's probably going to be just fine for their use case. But it's definitely not a perfect solution and we definitely shouldn't throw away decades worth of knowledge and experience like the article is implying.

[detaro]

Qt's QML uses OpenGL and can at least render into an FBO in your existing OpenGL context more or less out of the box. Integrating it with a game render loop deeper should be possible too, but more effort.

[pjmlp]

Qt is moving into a 3D API agnostic backend.

[detaro]

Sure, for Qt 6, so at some not-yet known point in the next few years (I doubt they'll get that done next year). Whereas both the FBO method or a custom renderer are things you can do today.

[pjmlp]

With Scaleform being one of the most common ones.

[naveen99]

Which GUI middleware libraries do you like ?