Looking at code and wondering if you got the buttons correct hurts my head... Is there any way to make GUI making easier?

Studying the vanilla guis to get an understanding of how they work will make gui making easier for you.

Short of writing a framework to do auto-layout of GUI widgets (it would be a considerable service to the modding community if someone did that!), no, not really.

 

My current technique is to draw a mockup of the GUI using Intaglio, put dimension lines all over it, and then transcribe the dimensions into constants in the code.

 

You can also help yourself by writing code to do some of the layout calculations. For example, if you have a row of buttons all the same size, write a loop to lay them out.

I usually throw one component at a fixed size and location on the screen, then I render it and look at the size of it compared to the screen and other elements. Then i look at my drawing of how I want the GUI to look like, trying to think of which proportions things need to be scaled to in order to fit the screen inn a suitable way.

 

The annoying thing is that once the main setup of the GUI is done, like all the components are inn somewhat correct place and scale and I start to fine tune and adjust small details I have to restart the application(re-run) in order to see the effect which makes it quite tedious.

OK, thank you guys.