[sldev] New Viewer Shell Proposal

Dale Glass dale at daleglass.net
Wed Aug 22 06:29:44 PDT 2007


On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 11:34:01AM +0900, Alissa Sabre wrote:
> > 2. Use Qt instead of your own system. Will look a lot closer to native,
> > and those people work full time on this stuff, so it'll be more
> > polished.
> 
> More polished than what?

More polished than rolling your own widgets. Now, LL has actually done
it quite well, but IMO, coding things like list views, buttons,
checkboxes, etc is something that should be avoided if possible.

> Seriously, I don't understand why you want Qt.  SL viewer doesn't use
> so-called UI compatibility layer.  It interracts through OS's native
> APIs.  Qt (or any other compatibility layers) can't be better than
> direct use of native APIs.  (Ah, except for Linux; it uses GTK for
> framing and SDL for surface grabbing and input events on Linux (and
> only on Linux.))
What you seem to be speaking about is very tiny parts of the code that
are OS specific. That's not what I mean. I mean doing the UI in Qt.
Toolbar, menu, inventory, profile screen, etc.



> 
> On the other hand, I don't prefer Qt because of the following
> I18N-unfriendly features: (My experiences on Qt is limited and may be
> outdated, so please correct me if I'm wrong.  Actually, I even didn't
> know Qt can coexist with OpenGL!)
Translation issue would probably not be important, as the UI could still
be done by reading the XML UI files, just using Qt widgets for it.


My ideal conception of SL UI looks like what Creatures 1 and 2 were
like:

http://www.gamewaredevelopment.co.uk/gallery/C1/c1
http://www.gamewaredevelopment.co.uk/gallery/C2/C2_screen005

Those games used the normal Windows UI, and that made Creatures 2 quite
tolerable, despite it being quite slow at the time it was released. 

Creatures 3 and Docking Station switched to the "let's roll our own 
widgets" paradigm, and as a result it was PAIN to work with. Where C2 
would have a list or a dropdown list, which worked at the same speed any
other program would, in C3 you'd get something like this:

(Prev) Current selection (Next)

And have to click "Next" 50 times, with a horrible framerate too.

While SL isn't nearly that bad, the point still stands, I think: People
working full time on widgets figured long ago which things really
sucked, and got rid of them.
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