The Usecase
I wrote a custom UI framework in PyGame, a library used for software rendering (graphics on the CPU), to support my experiments while giving me a standard interactive layer using event-driven paradigms similar to other UI frameworks.
The requirements were specific:
It needed to be transparent - I didn't want my UI layer to add extra cost over standard software rendering, which means no workarounds to get it to display custom canvases
- I didn't want my UI layer to add extra cost over standard software rendering, which means no workarounds to get it to display custom canvases It needed to be in Python - The main goal is to have an interactive layer ready to spin up for rapid experimentation. Python has a vast ecosystem of libraries and is fast to write - the UI layer needs to match that iteration speed.
Starting From Nothing
Hello
UI at its most simplest.
The initial architecture focused on brutal simplicity. I persisted a flat list of components that I would manually place by first sketching it out in Photoshop, and every frame the engine ran a minimal loop:
Hit-test: Compare the mouse coordinates and click state with the coordinates of every single component in the flat hierarchy, triggering any click/hover handlers on any components that passed the hit-test.
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