> Show me a GUI builder that in fact produces clean, non-overloaded code, > that does not break, if I manually change, add or remove stuff and so > effectively eases development. I am not aware of any. If they do not > match these criteria, but I am instead forced to stick with them (like > e.g. VS.NET), they are useless.
Gui builders really ought to store the gui structure and then let the coder write all the functionality hooks. Like, oh, I don't know, writing html. Oh wait, even html designers get it wrong. Oh well :) Yeah, gui builders aren't all they are cracked up to be. I am using CEGUI for my project, and I used the gui builder for a while, until I discovered that it randomly chose whether positions were stored as percent of screen size or pixel size, and I had to redo the whole thing manually. Don't criticize Marcus for not talking to other gui developers about their gui's problems, as far as I know, he was the first :) For me, I probably wouldn't purchase a gui toolkit. I have written some in the past, and find writing guis rather enjoyable. If I want to actually work on a game rather than a gui, I will look at what's out there and use it if I feel like it. Both PGU and ocemp really look like they control how I would write the game, which I think is fine in PGU's case, it's meant to be sort of a quickstart, not a last minute plugin. CEGUI definitely has influenced how I have programmed my game, but it has also saved me some time. If I couldn't find a suitable free library though, I would probably write my own toolkit as you have just done. Trolltech has succeeded with QT because is is usable in so many places for many different operations, and is also used in one of the two most popular linux desktops: KDE. If it weren't for their liscensing though, I can't help but think that GTK would not have done as well as it has. For a toolkit that can only be used in pygame, ignoring things like pyopengl, python-ogre, etc, such limited use I don't see as being very marketable. If it was generalized, and pluginable to almost any python program, that starts to have some real value.
