Help test the new Dear Imgui dialogs!

Recently we reached the goal of having replaced all GTK dialogs in the game with new ones using Dear Imgui, which is something that has been in the works for some years by now. All of the new dialogs are available in the latest nightly, and GTK is now no longer a dependency on Principia.

While all the dialogs should be functionally complete through my testing as I worked on the dialogs, there are inevitably issues with edge cases in the dialogs compared to the old GTK dialogs as this is all new code that hasn't seen the test of time yet.

Unless anything unexpected happens before then, I will be giving until the end of the month for people to test the new dialogs before I make a new stable release. If I don't hear anything then I assume every dialog is working perfectly fine for everyone.

How to test

Just go and download the latest nightly build for Windows or Linux, or build from source on Linux if you rather want to do that. Android does not have the Dear Imgui-based dialogs (and I'm unsure if they will ever have it).

In addition you can also test the new dialogs in the Principia web client, which has seen an update now that all the dialogs have been implemented, but still lags behind the latest nightly and has other issues related to it so keep this in mind. You can access the sandbox in your browser here, and you can play any level on the community site by pressing the "Play in browser (BETA)" link on any level page, which should become more prominent soon.

For a reference of all the dialogs in the game you can see the Imgui dialog tracker page: principia-web.se/imgui. For objects with dialogs I have uploaded this level which contains all objects with a configuration button that have a dialog associated with them, for more streamlined testing.

The most important issues I want to hear about are the critical ones that would be a regression in usability over the old GTK dialogs. I am aware some of the dialogs implemented may not be my best work design-wise (especially some of the lesser used or complex ones) but that all the functionality still is present and functional is the most important part for now. It will take some time getting used to the appearance of the new dialogs if you're an old player but I hope it will be an improvement in the long run.

If anyone wants to try to make a custom colour theme for Dear Imgui that would look nice with the game then that would also be appreciated - I'll likely add a setting to switch between different themes for the dialogs so we can have more than one.

My PCs in shambles but I wanna help 😭

Hello!

Great work on the new dialogs, personally I really like the new style. It's also great to see dropping gtk as a dependency! So, again, fantastic work.

I apologise if this is the wrong medium to talk about these kinds of things. Should I have posted this somewhere else?

I've done some testing on an amd64 linux machine with the latest nightly appimage version (from commit https://github.com/Bithack/principia/actions/runs/30498447865)

I think I've found a bug introduced by the Dear Imgui dialogs on certain components like the receiver, transmitter and mini-transmitter: when manually inputting the maximum permitted value (4294967295 or -1), exiting and trying to reopen the component settings dialogue (cog) the game completely hangs on my end (kill -9 required) Another minor thing here is that setting a negative frequency value correctly wraps around in the input box but does not in the "Listening on frequency: " text indicator (it shows exactly the original input negative value)

For some reason the broadcaster does not seem to be affected.

Tested in the stable appimage version for linux and it does not seem to be affected, maybe because those components use the old gtk UI.

I probably missed this, but is there any way to increase verbosity for Principia's run.log? The last entry before the hang is just "I: clicked Receiver". Appending -v doesn't seem to change this, atleast for the appimage version.

Another small thing: in the game settings menu, sound volume is capped to a very high value and also accepts negative values (which behave the same as their positive counterpart). Manually entering an absurdly high value seems to break all sound (nothing is heard?)

I also found that the sticky note and prompt don't have a limit for the amount of text you can enter. It seems to work correctly, but can consume large amounts of memory (on my system several gigabytes) if a stupidly large amount of text is entered. The old gtk variant of the components UI appear to have an upper limit (some gtk errors are spewed out)

I hope this was of some help.

Thank you for the testing! Yes this thread is okay to report your findings in, I'll take a look at everything. :)

Forgot to reply but I fixed all the issues brought up. Thanks for the feedback!

• All the "wireless" objects share the same dialogs, but the broadcaster can broadcast to a range of frequencies. The max range it can broadcast is 255, so the max frequency for non-broadcast objects is UINT32_MAX while the max frequency for broadcast objects is UINT32_MAX-255. Or that's how it seems to be in the GTK dialog, so I fixed it to be more like the old dialog and properly clamped the frequency field. I've hopefully also fixed the hang, and other signedness issues in the dialog.
• Fixed the clamping on the audio setting. By default in Dear Imgui you can bypass range limits in all number fields and you need to specify to always clamp a field which turns out to be a bit error prone...
• Limited the sticky note text to the limit of the old GTK dialog.
• Put some reasonable limits for the prompt settings dialog, and also improved the prompt dialog itself to scale better to more text.
• I also added word wrap to some multiline text fields I forgot to put them on

As for logging - there is no way to get more log output from Principia with just command-line arguments. If you make a debug build there will be another level of debug logs, but they are not extremely helpful IMO and for stuff like hangs you'd really want to have a debugger to step through the execution. Reliable steps to reproduce are still very helpful and I managed to find the place it hung on myself with a debugger.

Interesting stuff and great work... Glad to be of help!

Thanks for the info about debugging, next time I'll come better prepared. :-)