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SCake/Altermatic UI Poll
For Project Sugar Cake I've had a placeholder UI for a while now and while it works quite well mechanically it was always intended to be replaced, or, at least completely re-written. Initially SCake's UI was going to be standalone and be specifically geared toward animation control and specialized purposes, however with the introduction of Altermatic potentially needing a UI I've been playing with another idea. A Unified UI system.
To quickly cover what this unified UI would be, the current SCake UI works through registering events and then listening for a callback, that callback then triggers the code associated with it. Think Skyrim's MCM system, it works quite well and was always designed in a way it could be opened to the API. The issue with the current UI is the UI was never 'finished' and has a lot of logic holes I manually work around for now. With a re-write I'd be able to fill in these holes and make a new universal system any mod could theoretically latch onto.
This is where the question comes in (and the Poll). I already have a system figured out for unifying SCake and Altermatic's UI together but should I make this Unified UI another optional framework and open it up for other modders to use? It would work similarly to SCake's API system where modders would be able to call the API and register their own UI entries with the addition of a callback system, and it would preferably be able to use a parallel input system just like how SCake's current UI currently works. The downside to opening it up, however, is that would add additional work since I'd need to maintain an SDK and it also means more specialized uses may need a bit more work to complete.
Of course the preferred situation would have been for another UI framework to crop up and we'd just optionally use that with a fallback UI built in in-case a user didn't want to use it. But unfortunately nothing has really showed up which fits our needs, so just like with Altermatic I'm kind of just looking into building it myself since I need it for what we're trying to do with both SCake and now Altermatic. Keep in mind, this isn't some extravagant UI overhaul or anything and initial implementations will be basic (effectively align with how SCake's current UI works but much more stable on the backend and with a unified approach).
Work hasn't gone too deep on it yet (won't for a while longer), so that's why I'm asking the community on what they think, so when I do deep dive into it, I can set things up specifically for whatever path we choose! If your thoughts are more complex than the poll you can always leave comments or participate in our Discord as well! Curious on people's thoughts!
To quickly cover what this unified UI would be, the current SCake UI works through registering events and then listening for a callback, that callback then triggers the code associated with it. Think Skyrim's MCM system, it works quite well and was always designed in a way it could be opened to the API. The issue with the current UI is the UI was never 'finished' and has a lot of logic holes I manually work around for now. With a re-write I'd be able to fill in these holes and make a new universal system any mod could theoretically latch onto.
This is where the question comes in (and the Poll). I already have a system figured out for unifying SCake and Altermatic's UI together but should I make this Unified UI another optional framework and open it up for other modders to use? It would work similarly to SCake's API system where modders would be able to call the API and register their own UI entries with the addition of a callback system, and it would preferably be able to use a parallel input system just like how SCake's current UI currently works. The downside to opening it up, however, is that would add additional work since I'd need to maintain an SDK and it also means more specialized uses may need a bit more work to complete.
Of course the preferred situation would have been for another UI framework to crop up and we'd just optionally use that with a fallback UI built in in-case a user didn't want to use it. But unfortunately nothing has really showed up which fits our needs, so just like with Altermatic I'm kind of just looking into building it myself since I need it for what we're trying to do with both SCake and now Altermatic. Keep in mind, this isn't some extravagant UI overhaul or anything and initial implementations will be basic (effectively align with how SCake's current UI works but much more stable on the backend and with a unified approach).
Work hasn't gone too deep on it yet (won't for a while longer), so that's why I'm asking the community on what they think, so when I do deep dive into it, I can set things up specifically for whatever path we choose! If your thoughts are more complex than the poll you can always leave comments or participate in our Discord as well! Curious on people's thoughts!
