Re: [pygame] poll: GUI library advice / current GUI info ( for wiki )

[jug <jug@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi jake,

1]  What libraries do you use most?
The first pygame gui I used was gooepy but I think it was a bit buggy 
and inflexible.
Then I tried spg (the first version) which was quite cool but the code 
was very
unpythonic and thus very hard to hack and extend eg. to write new widgets.
After some time of not using pygame guis I needed one again and thought 
to write my
own small and easy-to-use gui. As nearly always if you plan to write 
your own small
and easy version of a complicated and complex module X I wrote my own quite
complex pygame gui. But I hope that it is less complicated than others. 
However,
it's still in (more or less) active development and not yet released 
(there is just a
public svn repo at http://tinyurl.com/33oe6xu ) so I'm currently the 
only user and
haven't got any feedback from "normal" users yet.

2]  Advantages to that library, over others? ( Special notes, ie: good 
with X. GooeyPy uses CSS, etc...)
The 4 most important aspects:
- flexible measurements: Any positions and sizes can be absolute or 
relative or
                                          mixed (eg. "20%+30px"). This 
allows more flexible layouts
                                          since resizing the pygame 
window won't crash your gui.
- flexible styling: Styling can (but don't have to) be done completely 
distinct from
                            the widgets and changed all the time (i.e. 
you can change the
                            entire appearance of your gui on runtime). 
Since styles are cached
                            only widgets with a changed style will be 
redrawn. The use of pre-
                            and suffixes makes it easy to define 
different styles for different
                            states (like mouse-over, ...).
- flexible event system: All kinds of callbacks, notifications, etc. are 
done via events
                                        (of  an own event system, no 
pygame user-events are needed).
                                        Its easy to send and listen to 
events and implement any
                                        "communication" this way.
- flexible widget system: Since game UIs may be very individual and game 
specific
                                          its very important to provide 
an easy way to write new
                                          widgets. Thanks to the first 
three features own widget
                                          classes often consist of just 
a few lines.


3] Disadvantages of those libraries? ( Special notes, ie: hard with X)
The pygame guis I have used were mostly widget sets but no guis. They 
provide
a set of widgets with styling options (using a (kinda inflexible) predefined
image set) but no (or a very limited) geometry manager and no easy way 
to extend
them and write own widgets.

4] Recommended games to view for examples?
I've used it for two of my projects recently:
http://tinyurl.com/3ycqe6z

5] Any changes to be aware of in pygreloaded , or already exist that is 
relevant for GUIs?
Hu? pygame2 != pygame. pygame2 has another api and thus guis (and 
programs/libs in general)
for pygame won't run with pygame2.

7] Anything else?
Pygame (g)uis is a difficult topic. I think lots of people here have 
their own (mostly private)
pygame-utils package and use it to build a new gui for every game. I 
know of at least two
other guys who started working on their own (generic) gui or ui-helper lib.
So, the ultimate pygame gui is yet to be written.

Regards,
Julian