Playnite "11" development update

Hello everyone!

this is another post to catch you up with Playnite 11's development.

UI framework situation

First of all, I finally decided what the new UI framework will be used in Playnite going forward. It's going to be Avalonia. There basically isn't a "perfect" framework, sadly, but this is currently the best choice for Playnite (especially with multi platform support in mind).

The other option I was seriously considering, Godot engine's UI framework, was looking pretty good as well, but initial investment into it would be way too time consuming to get it on the same level of user friendliness as Avalonia (mainly from addon developer's point of view).

There will be some noticeable effort needed to get Avalonia going as well, for example they have no controller support at all, but it will be much less maintenance effort in long term. Plus, Avalonia is XAML based framework similar to WPF (library we use currently), so migration should be more painless for addon developers.

Progress situation

Maybe you noticed that there hasn't been too much activity in Playnite 11's code branch on GitHub lately. I've become more self conscious about people looking at my broken/unfinished work so I decided to work mainly in private repository, for now. This is not something long term and Playnite's code will be always open, I'm just not going to push out P11 changes publicly until they are more stable and reflect what P11 is actually going to be.

As far as progress itself, majority of non-UI code rewrite has been finished, with big exception being emulation support. I haven't decided how to handle emulation yet since it will be now more separate from core functionality to make it easier to update it separately.

I now started getting some basic UI version working and mocking up new designs. A lot of dialogs and screens will be completely redesigned (addons view, settings view, game edit dialog etc.). I will be definitely posting these mockups to get some feedback first before starting to implement them, this will be happening on Discord.

Name and scope situation

Playnite 11 is now turning out to be basically complete rewrite and scope of changes is so large that it wouldn't be fair to call this next version "Playnite 11". I don't know what new naming will be yet, but it has to be something saying that this  "new" Playnite is a separate app at this point.

This also means that "P11" won't support in place upgrade from P10. The amount of changes is too much to guarantee safe and stable upgrade (plus none of P10 addons being compatible), so P11 will be only supported as completely separate installation with an option to import specific library data from P10.

Closing

I'm sorry I was unable to show something more exciting, most of the work has been on non-UI stuff, but hopefully next dev update will be more interesting since one of the first UI things I will be implementing is new "view/layout editor".

As always, thank you very much for continued support!

Josef