My plan to create, replace, and delete regional maps on the fly means I need to use multi-threading, where a program basically splits itself into multiple concurrent programs. This is so that Undiscovered Worlds can get on with generating regional terrain while the user is moving around and viewing the world. I've never done this before, so I've been learning how, and fortunately it's not too hard, at least in principle. To practise, I've added a progress bar for world creation - one thread creates the world while another updates the progress bar - and it works quite nicely.
Adding the progress bar made me think again about the GUI. I'm using Dear ImGui, which is a very widely used library, but mostly for internal use rather than user-facing interfaces, because it's pretty simple to incorporate into one's code but doesn't look very fancy. (Also it's easily recognisable!) I certainly don't want to change to a different GUI again, but I thought it would be nice to try to change the appearance of Dear ImGui a little to make it a bit more distinctive and attractive.
So I've had a go at tinkering with the code of Dear ImGui. I've been shamelessly copying the style of NanoGUI, another library that I was using for a while in an earlier version of UW, but abandoned as it proved too tricky to port to Windows. My very rough hacks can't really reproduce its appearance, but I think the results look quite nice:
Hopefully it doesn't look quite so generic now. There is still some tweaking to be done, of course, but the next focus is on getting some version of the regional detail up and running.
