Hi all very excited about the release of Compose multiplatfo

Question

Hi all very excited about the release of Compose multiplatform I ve been trying to think about how to apply it for game UIs it s clearly possible but there are some questions i have about how to implement a style that is significantly different from material for example a pixelated theme Continued in thread

abbic · Answer

focusing on a pixelated theme oftentimes the sources forbutton decorations and UI elements comes from a tileset would having a sprite outline on a button be a case of painting bitmaps on a custom button implementation or something of the sort

abbic · Answer

that wouldnt work in combination with theme colours however

mcpiroman · Answer

A nice thing about Compose is that although many useful pieces are missing you can quite easily go to appropriately lower level and implement them yourself unlike say html It should not be very hard to ignore all of the material design and implement your own UI building blocks E g take a look how `Surface`is implemented it mostly just calls a `Box`with some padding shadows clipping etc Same with `TextField` but it has more levels of indirection You can simply copy a function at some level and change what can t be changed via parameters The same can be done with creating your own composition locals e g for controlling a theme In fact I also plan to use Compose for a pixel art game not only UI and although `Image`probabely won t fit it is also not hard to adjust it

abbic · Answer

< mcpiroman> thank you for your reply i get about that far down before starting to scratch my head against the implementation details of how to actually do this eg with a button that has a frame made out of box drawing characters

abbic · Answer

because the source is from a bitmap it feels as though you have no choice but to make every button an image or canvas or something and even then that might lock you out of making the most of existing UI apis

mcpiroman · Answer

You want to mix sprites and ascii art

abbic · Answer

technically the ascii are sprites too since they come from a png tileset for my implementation anyway

abbic · Answer

totally wasnt clear with what i linked consider those box drawing characters equivalent with corner and line sprites for drawing a pixel art box

mcpiroman · Answer

AFAIK all the existing UI elements that actually draw something do that through a quite minimal APIs like `Modifier paint`or `DrawScope`and whatever you try to achieve should also be doable by mixing the manual use of these and existing higher level blocks E g to wrap something like a button in a ascii art border just make a copy of `Modifier border`that instead of drawing solid shape on the `DrawScope` draws corner and edges tiles Edges could then be optimized to use repeated texture sampling I think

abbic · Answer

I see thank you thats a good pointer and i ll try experiment with this some time in the near future