Hi
I want to create a plugin editor by using VSTGUI4 API to draw the interface directly, but the sample plugins in the SDK all use uidesc to make a GUI. I notice that we can use CView to draw something, is there any detailed example project about how to create a IPlugView only by using VSTGUI drawing-related API without any external description file ?
There’s no example, but you have to use the VSTGUIEditor class instead of the VST3Editor class as a starting point. You need to make your own subclass of VSTGUIEditor and override the open and close methods. In the open method you need to create the frame member variable and there you also add all the child views to the frame object. And in the close method you need to destroy the frame object.
Out of interest, why do you want to write this boilerplate code yourself? Using the UIDescription editor is so much more fun…
Thanks for your detailed answser.
In fact, many people have asked me the same question you are interested in. The reason why I prefer to draw the GUI directly is that I’ve spent nearly four years developing a DAW software named “harmonia” by myself. I use Qt as my main GUI framework and there is no suitable audio-related widget library in Qt. So I force myself to draw hundreds of different kind of functional panels and knobs in my project using Qt “paintEvent”. In this process, I became very skilled in writing interface layout without any designer tool.
Then you may want to use Qt instead of VSTGUI for your VST3 UI Library.
There are open source license and link library related issues when using QT to develop audio plugin so I have to choose another framework. I evaluated several options such as Imgui, NanoVG+GLFW, JUCE, but I ruled out these options because they are inappropriate for various reasons. For now, maybe VSTGUI is the best way to do this. I’m still exploring