Can Avalonia be used in a way similar to ImGui

[denys-volodarskyi]

https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

It outputs optimized vertex buffers that you can render anytime in your 3D-pipeline-enabled application.

Can Avalonia be used this way?

• I inject my avalonia app into address space of the target process (as a dll or exe)
• Run Avalonia, it renders graphics
• Output it via D3D

[thevortexcloud]

Not sure. But my understanding is that Avalonia can be embedded in anything that:

1. Supports .NET (although you can probably get around this using AOT, like this person who made Rust bindings)
2. Supports SkiaSharp

As such there are people who have embedded Avalonia inside 3d game engines such as Unity, Unreal, and Godot.

You technically don't even need "graphics" there is this project which makes Avalonia useable for terminal apps.

[kyuranger]

BTW, what does the engine render these games? SkiaSharp or the engine of Unity/Unreal/Goddot itself?

[thevortexcloud]

I am not sure. I am not particularly familiar with how Avalonia handles rendering. Although the core team did put up this blog post awhile back that does explain some of it.

https://avaloniaui.net/Blog/avalonia-platform-support-why-it-s-simple

The Godot implementation is open source if you feel like digging through it too. It's a surprisingly small amount of code for it. In which case it looks like it's being rendered to a Skia surface and then renders it to a Godot texture and does some interop with Godot's GPU handling. But I only skimmed it so I likely missed something.