Elysian Shadows

I'm currently building an engine using SDL, and am wondering on your guys' experience with either QT or wxWidgets when making a map editor. Is there a major difference, in your opinion on their ease of use? Does either integrate better with SDL?


Thanks,
~Asian

I can't say i've really worked with wxWidgets, but i have worked with Qt and it's great. It amazing for developing C++ gui. I'm not sure if it integrates well with SDL but it works great with OpenGL, so if you have experience with OpenGL go for Qt.

I have absolutely no experience with OpenGL. I would like to try it, but I'm afraid I'd be overwhelmed by the complexity of it. How difficult would you say OpenGL is for a beginner?

Thanks,
~Asian

If you used QT, you probably wouldn't even have to use OpenGL explicitly. QPainter can be hardware accelerated and handles all OpenGL calls for you.

GyroVorbis wrote:If you used QT, you probably wouldn't even have to use OpenGL explicitly. QPainter can be hardware accelerated and handles all OpenGL calls for you.

Eventually, I want to use OpenGL instead of SDL, how hard is it compared to SDL?

epicasian wrote:

GyroVorbis wrote:If you used QT, you probably wouldn't even have to use OpenGL explicitly. QPainter can be hardware accelerated and handles all OpenGL calls for you.

Eventually, I want to use OpenGL instead of SDL, how hard is it compared to SDL?

I'm not going to sugar coat this for you, OpenGL is a complex API. Where it takes one line to render a sprite with SDL, it may take ten or twenty lines (or more depending on what your trying to do of course) in OpenGL. But you do gain alot in the way of rendering power, and you can write your own rendering system so that you can render sprites in a manner similar to SDL i.e. with one line of code. The best advice I can give you if your thinking about trying OpenGL is to take a look at some of the online sources such as NeHe, this may give you a better understanding of what your getting yourself into.

Also as, Falco said, Qt has its own rendering system called QPainter, which renders sprites very simply. QPainters back end is in OpenGL so you get a lot of power from there. It's something to think about and it's easy to pick up. In the end it's really up to you.

Qt is my opinion, idk if you can use sdl with it, I tried but sdl defines main as SDLmain and QT as qmain so it dident work for me but i was just using it to load images so the QImage worked for me. the QPainter is nice although I create my textures and render them the old fashion way using the qt painter is nice

from some tuts I've seen it looks like you can use int main but maybe not for what you guys are talking about.. IDK I haven't done much research into qt

eatcomics wrote:from some tuts I've seen it looks like you can use int main but maybe not for what you guys are talking about.. IDK I haven't done much research into qt

i used int main but i got errors saying that qt defines main as qmain and SDL defines main as SDLmain

WSPSNIPER wrote:

eatcomics wrote:from some tuts I've seen it looks like you can use int main but maybe not for what you guys are talking about.. IDK I haven't done much research into qt

i used int main but i got errors saying that qt defines main as qmain and SDL defines main as SDLmain

Why would you even want to use SDL with QT? Is that not like a million times overkill? SDL is an entire multimedia library, and QT incorporates all functionality that SDL could offer. OpenGL at least makes sense, because it's just a 3D graphics API, and QT uses it for the back-end anyway.

Will your game and engine be standalone applications? If so, why not just use QT to handle everything for your editor? You probably won't even have to touch a single OpenGL call.

GyroVorbis wrote:

WSPSNIPER wrote:

eatcomics wrote:from some tuts I've seen it looks like you can use int main but maybe not for what you guys are talking about.. IDK I haven't done much research into qt

i used int main but i got errors saying that qt defines main as qmain and SDL defines main as SDLmain

Why would you even want to use SDL with QT? Is that not like a million times overkill? SDL is an entire multimedia library, and QT incorporates all functionality that SDL could offer. OpenGL at least makes sense, because it's just a 3D graphics API, and QT uses it for the back-end anyway.

Will your game and engine be standalone applications? If so, why not just use QT to handle everything for your editor? You probably won't even have to touch a single OpenGL call.

ya i found that out when i was forced to go with qt lol. When i did i saw how nice and easy it is but one thing about it is its kindof overkill its self. the QRect class has like a billion functions that do the same thing like moveTopLeft, moveTo, move and setCoords, setRect exc. i just created my own rect struct containing x, y, w, h and a function setRect(int x, int y, int w, int h)

SFML integrates directly into QT, so maybe you should check that out.

Live-Dimension wrote:SFML integrates directly into QT, so maybe you should check that out.

tried it and loved it until i got 2 renderwindows and the textures wouldent load on the second one lol