This document is meant to summarize the discussion that started at the end of June 2020 about improving Stride's UI (Game Studio's UI).
Initially MechWarrior99 came up with some ideas on making the UX better. One of these ideas was to make something akin to Blender's Workspaces. Then this issue was mentioned - it may have inspired #637 and #667, which tried to improve somewhat the current UI.
Next MechWarrior99 worked on the improved UI design of different parts of Stride, starting with components (msg). During that time qbic suggested changes to the 3D translation gizmo (msg). MechWarrior99 also introduced a cool idea for better search system (msg). Salah chafai pointed out how it is very hard to navigate and edit Game Studio in it's current form. MechWarrior presented a larger part of his UI design (msg) and talked about 'context windows'.
At this point in the conversation the main idea was to introduce new UI in a rewrite of Game Studio in Avalonia, a cross platform alternative to WPF.
profan shared his thoughts on editor features he likes/dislikes based on his experience with Godot and Stride (msg onwards). WV|RS mentioned that "Add asset" should have its own button in the top bar. MechWarrior99 presented further designs (msg). Then came up the topic of actually implementing new UI (msg, xen's answer).
Then the ui-ux channel got used a bit for in-game UI as well as Editor UI. The follwoing UI approaches/libraries were mentioned:
- HTML based UI
- UltraLight UI rendering engine (integration with Stride)
- Blazor with MiniRazor
- RmlUi UI rendering engine
- C#
- C/C++
An interesting idea was to make a better UI system for Stride and rewrite Game Studio in that. One of possibilities is to create a Stride backend for Avalonia (pros of shared UI, where to start).
raidenXR mentioned that Avalonia may be much slower than WPF (msg).
Finally I wrote a post about how we either focus on plugins or the UI rewrite (msg). A great point that dfkeenan made was to start working on a very small, very extendible barebones Game Studio and slowly build it up (with everything being a plugin). I actually thought about it before - even start with a simple cross platform editor for components/assets that allows to modify correctly existing YAML files.