I've been down a deep rabbit hole inventing the universe to make my apple pie, but it's actually getting somewhere.

I'm back in C++ because it's what I'm comfortable with. Got a base for a UI system with a pretty generic core running a hybrid IM thing where the scene is more or less recreated each update, but there is a node structure that allows for iterative layouts etc.

Rendering and layout can be done with custom callbacks.

Had some time to tinker a bit with Knixel this evening, and after infinite amounts of flip-flopping I'm _back_ in Godot. One thing I did during my Rust adventures was adding multi-selection for layers, so now I'm retro-fitting that into the original version.

Not fully functional yet as it touches pretty much everything, but it's moving forward and feels like a must-have now that it's mostly there.

Since I'm totally unable to decide on anything ever, I'm back in Rust for Knixel for a while.

Some main reasons:
* I want to learn more Rust
* Debugging works better in Rust than gdscript.
* WGPU runs on web, while the RenderingDevice parts I needed in Godot currently do not.

Some downsides:
* I'm slower with Rust.
* I had a bunch of stuff done in Godot already that I need to redo.
* Not loving egui/immediate mode UI. It's acceptable though.

(Rust/ferris logo by @maggie)

Considering calling it on the Knixel rust port and go back to Godot. There are some upsides to doing it in rust but I'm just not finding it very fun anymore. I'm a bit worried some things will be problematic with Godot far down the line but I guess I can deal with that then.

Still not 100% decided but yeah that's where I'm at.

Starting to get a hang of egui. Nothing is functional or hooked up to any data really, just trying UI stuff out to see if I can do what I want to do with egui while also learning Rust.

Soon time to start try to port some actual functionality over. Gonna be more Rust to learn for that.

The rust+Knixel saga continues. After more hassle than I'd like to admit I managed to composite an offscreen image and present it in egui.

Rendering to float textures seems to not work on web so -

Ok as I wrote this I thought "wait maybe it's only f32 that doesn't work, let's try f16", and that actually _does_ work.

So I guess maybe that's all the pieces I need then and I can try putting something together, that as a bonus maybe works on the web too. Let's go!

So I'm entertaining the idea of rewriting Knixel in Rust (currently Godot).

Looking into egui and it _seems_ to cover what I need one way or another, and wgpu seems very similar to the RenderingDevice in Godot that I use for the image compositing. (After all they're both APIs built on top of the same underlying interfaces.)

A reason for me to try out Rust I guess, and also mess around more with immediate mode UIs (which I have have an on/off relationship with).

Although I've made quite some progress on Knixel already I'm honestly considering rewriting it in something that's not Godot. Not because Godot is bad but it's also not a 100% great fit for it.

Especially all the processing would probably be better off using something like Skia (which is fantastic IMO). I could maybe keep the UI in Godot and do the processing with SkiaSharp via C#.

What I _do_ like with Godot is that it's easy to deploy for many platforms out of the box.

Published a binary release of Knixel to Github in case anyone is brave enough to try it.

https://github.com/SonnyBonds/knixel/releases/tag/v0.0.1-alpha

Ok I think all the (few) tools and effects support tiling properly now. Nice!

Ok, I think tiled layer movement actually might work, with painting and everything, and it's pretty cool.

Tiling is something I want in Knixel so I thought I'd make sure to get it in early so it's there for all functionality going forward.

Haven't quite decided how to handle moving layers across a border though (end of the video) from a UX point of view. I can make it wrap, but in non-tiled mode a layer is allowed to be outside of and even bigger than the image canvas. This makes things weird when enabling/disabling tiling.

Looking into text drawing for Knixel and it's going to be a bit of a hurdle. There doesn't seem to be any low level access to text drawing the same way other rendering can be done directly with RenderingDevice. As far as I can tell it has to go through TextServer/RenderingServer and thereby be bound to the main frame update cycle rather than done immediately.

Might leave that bridge to cross for later.

Another basic hygiene run, adding layer name editing, folder expansion and hierarchical visibility indication.

Knixel is moving a bit slow right now because other things in life has priority, but I just switched all internal storage to use linear RGBAF instead of sRGB RGBA8.

The file format still uses 8 bit PNG so it's just a runtime thing. Not sure what the best format for float data is. KTX maybe? Godot can't save that out of the box though.

I will eventually switch it or make it optional, but I'll leave it at this for now and focus on getting the thing usable.

Something's iffy about my blending. In-between areas get somewhat darker.

I assume I've gotten something sRGB related wrong somewhere so I'm not linear. Not sure where though.

Added some new stuff to Knixel. Basic hygiene in the form of image/canvas resizing and an erase tool, but also layer grouping.

I introduced some compositing bugs with the groups though so time for a bit of bugfixing.

Also there are some design choices to be made on how groups + opacity should work.