Blog

• The road to v2.0

  published on 10/4/2012 2:51 PM

  Work has been progressing along for the v2.0 release. It has however taken a bit longer than I hoped. The main feature of the release was going to be a completely rebuilt GUI using Qt 5.0. This is so I can remove the dependency on .Net and the commercial GUI control library I used with it. That however relied on that Qt 5.0 actually got released and it has been postponed since Nokia, the previous owner, sold it. Luckily it is progressing and what I have tested so far from the beta that got release not too long ago looks very promising.

  I started to rebuild the gui in WPF first but then Microsoft couldn't give a clear response on how they saw the future and what technology they though should be used for real desktop applications (WinForm, WPF, Silverlight, 'Metro'). So I started to look around for a alternative that should be supported for the foreseeable future. That is where I found Qt and comparing QML (Qt) with XAML (WPF) it just boggles the mind of how complicated Microsoft did it's control setup and how simple and easy it could be to create a gui. Qt really succeeded there and used a javascript engine as a base. Something a lot of developers already know or have use for in other projects.

  While waiting for the official Qt 5.0 release I have however added some new features to the engine that looks very promising. I'll do some separate posts about these new changes in the future.

  As it looks now so will there be breaking changes in the scene format and I want to get as many breaking changes in as possible in v2.0 so I don't have to break the scene format again in some other future release.