A framework to facilitate reusable, modular widget design for real-time interactive systems

Game engines have become popular development platforms for real-time interactive systems. Contemporary game engines, such as Unity and Unreal, feature component-based architectures, in which an object's appearance and behavior is determined by a collection of component scripts added to that object. This design pattern allows common functionality to be contained within component scripts and shared among different types of objects. In this paper, we describe a flexible framework that enables programmers to design modular, reusable widgets for real-time interactive systems using a collection of component scripts. We provide a reference implementation written in C# for the Unity game engine. Making an object, or a group of objects, part of our managed widget framework can be accomplished with just a few drag-and-drop operations in the Unity Editor. While our framework provides hooks and default implementations for common widget behavior (e.g., initialization, refresh, and toggling visibility), programmers can also define custom behavior for a particular widget or combine simple widgets into a hierarchy and build arbitrarily rich ones. Finally, we provide an overview of an accompanying library of scripts that support functionality for testing and networking.