[sldev] New Viewer Shell Proposal

[Lawson English]

Dale Glass wrote:
> 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.
>
>   

Its ironic that you want a GAME (or virtual world) to look like the host 
OS. IIRC, Apple's human interface guidelines always made a specific 
exemption for games interfaces because the need to present an interface 
consistent with the game overrode the CHI guideline of presenting an 
interface consistent with the rest of the system.



>> 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.
>
>   

Using OpenGL for the interface drawing and the LInden's own widgets is 
in-line with all other immersive worlds.

>
>   
>> 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 outdated, so please correct me if I'm wrong.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.
>   

But what sucks for universal workflows on a given system may not suck 
for an immersive world.