MHGames » qt

A quick update..

Mika — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 08:07:00 +0000

I haven’t been coding much, but instead writing my Bachelor’s thesis. There’s still plenty of work to do before it’s finished. Well, serves me right for not starting it earlier in the Summer like I intended to..

School starts in September again, yawn. The Qt Jambi update I’m waiting for might also happen in Sept.

Oh, I went to see The Dark Knight again – it was even better this time, like I thought it would. 5/5 it is..

PolyAnim progress..

Mika — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:44:00 +0000

Well, I’ve made a logo. See?

Okay, there’s a bit more. The core library itself is in (somewhat arbitary) versi0n 0.5. Most of the important functionality is in there already. Anchors and different blending modes are still missing. Read more about the current state of features here.

There’s still a big mystery in this project, for I have no idea if the code is fast enough for the intended usage (which is game sprites)! The tests I have made are composed only of a few polygons, which is not very demanding.. Therefore I’ve started the work on the animation editor, using Qt Jambi. But alas, I have bumped into a severe bug, which unfortunately crashes the Java VM. While waiting for that to be solved (the bug fix is scheduled for the next Qt Jambi patch release), I’m wondering what I’m going to do in the mean time.

Should I hack a quick and dirty editor in Swing? Or work on the other (unimportant) parts of the real editor? Implement more features to the library? I don’t know, I’d rather not add more stuff to the lib, because in that case the editor’s going to have a lot of catching up to do.. Perhaps I could throw together a stress test using lots of random shapes.. Hmm..

Or I could succumb to the goodness that is (J)Box2D, like I momentarily did about a week ago. I made some platformer physics tests with it. Good stuff. All this is obviously for a grand purpose: finally making a (platformer) game that’s perhaps a bit more than just nice and simple 10-30 minutes fun. That’s my intention anyway, we’ll see what happens.

Getting tired of C++?

Mika — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 04:48:00 +0000

I’m starting to notice, that I’ve been probably spoiled beyond all redemption by the wonders of Java and Python. And by that, I mean the general relaxed feeling when developing, such as not having to deal with memory management* and so on. As I’ve been working with Java and Python all this spring (plus we use Java at work), now writing C++ for the sekrit projekt(tm) feels cumbersome.. Dealing with const references, virtual destructors, templates and whatnot just doesn’t have the same effect for me it once did.. What’s happening to me? Am I really getting tired of C++?

But wait! There’s more.. *bows head in shame*

I’ve been further tempted to the Dark Side by my very recent interest in Qt Jambi and LWJGL.. I mean, what the hell, is there really anything stopping me of doing the sekrit projekt(tm) in Java, using LWJGL and Qt Jambi for the editor (ooops, slipped that out!)? I think not!

So.. Perhaps we hear more about these shocking developments later on. Perhaps.

*) Incidentally, I’m doing my bachelor’s thesis on “Automatic Garbage Collection In Programming Languages”..

Intellisense in Visual C++ Express, and getting it working with Qt 4.4

Mika — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:18:00 +0000

Visual Studio Express editions are nice and free, but Visual C++ 2005/2008 Express seem to be lacking in the code completion (or Intellisense as it’s officially known) department. If I recall correctly, in MSVC++ 2003 (version 7.1, that is) Intellisense worked perfectly. When writing new code, Intellisense picked it right away, even without saving the source file. I never had any problems with it.

In MSVC++ 2005 and 2008 (Express editions, I haven’t tried the full featured versions – although I doubt they’d work any better..), the code completion has definitely taken a step backward. It just doesn’t work as nicely as it did in MSVC++ 2003. It seems to parse the source files quite lazily, and sometimes just doesn’t work at all. When given a moment, it works again. I’ve found out that switching between Release and Debug from the toolbar dropdown causes “Updating Intellisense…” to appear in the status bar. That helps, but it’s still not very convenient.

As I recently installed and compiled Qt 4.4, I noticed that Qt classes would not be in the code completion list at all. I included Qt’s include-directory to the “VC++ Directories” in Options. That wasn’t enough. Finally I got it working by including “$(QTDIR)\src” to the “Source files”, and listing all the Qt include subdirectories separately in “Include files”.

Plans for summer – Revisited

Mika — Mon, 26 May 2008 06:09:00 +0000

Change of plans: I don’t think I’ll do the CSSTint-rewrite this time.. I’ve got a much more interesting idea. While it’s still too early to talk about this, it involves Qt 4.4 (yay!) and OpenGL. I will write more about it when (or if) I have something to show.

Right now I’m wondering whether to go with SourceForge like I always have, or to use Google Code. Google Code seems nice and simple, as I’ll only need SVN and some pages (or a wiki). And yes, it’ll be open source.

Qt 4.4 released + plans for summer

Mika — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:11:00 +0000

Qt 4.4 framework was recently released. Hopefully PyQT 4.4 soon follows. Qt just rocks. =) Having been working with Java Swing (*cough*h o r r i b l e*cough*) these last four months, Qt 4.4 brings some light to the end of the tunnel..

Now that that’s out of the table, I can talk a little about a project I’m perhaps going to do next summer. It’s about remaking CSSTint. While I think the current Windows version of CSSTint is quite nice, it’s still… well, Windows-only. While I am using wxWidgets, it’s still doesn’t work in Linux properly – I have tried. I’m doing some nasty, ugly hacks in the code, so no wonder. All this could probably be fixed, but for the sake of learning and for an interesting experience, I’ve been thinking of rewriting the whole shebang.

I’m sure I will use Qt for the job, but I’m still undecided between C++ and Python. Learning Python has been interesting for me, as I’ve blogged before. Python version would also work on Windows as is, which won’t hurt even if the original is also for Windows. On the other hand I could reuse some of my non-GUI CSSTint code if I went with C++.. Decisions, decisions…

Anyway, that’s my current plan – things might still change.

My adventures with Python / PyQT

Mika — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:26:00 +0000

First of all, let me just say that Python + PyQt just rocks.

I’ve been recently learning Python. Just for fun, basically. Additional benefit is that now I have a better understanding on how to cope with Zope/Plone at my work. Anyway, apart from the Zope/Plone stuff the first thing I did in Python was a command-line script that allows creation and handling of .mpk files that I’ve used in a couple of my games. MPK or MPak is a simple WAD-like format that stores all the game files in a single package file. I had a C++ CLI application that did the job, but it was really a piece of crap..

So I deciced to write a replacement for that app, in Python. The finished script (mpak.py) is much nicer to use and works better. I wrote it in Linux and it worked as is in Windows too – neat.

Then, I wanted to try GUI stuff and went with PyQt. I had a simple DVD collection management software called MyDVDCollection that I had written in .NET using C#. It worked, but was not too good either. So I began hacking away with PyQt and now I have PyDVDCollection (pretty clever names, huh? ) that I use for maintaining my collection. It has less code and more features than its .NET counterpart. It works in Linux, naturally, and also beautifully in Vista.

As you can probably tell, I’m very impressed with PyQt and the Python language, and I’ll be using them in the future as well. =)