Horde3D

It struck me watching some video's of QT Creator now that nokia have bought them, that QT would be a great framework for all sorts of games, if only they could render a graphical UI (by graphical I mean using simple blits instead of the typical windows draw methods) over the top of a GL window.

Then I got to thinking about how neat it would be to have QT host a Horde window, which you can then press a key and have a UI editor, a behaviour tree editor and all other sorts of tools. A bit like a cheap version of Cryengine!

Not that I've got time to play around with it right now, but it would definitely be fascinating for tools.

As it is, I'm thinking of using QT to create a remote debugging interface library for my app (basically a remote property/object inspector). Plus a UI editor (some transform of QT's interface XML format) and maybe a cross platform behaviour tree editor. If I figure out how these things work seperately it might be fun to then look at integrating them.

QT has definitely matured recently and the QT "Creator" IDE looks pretty handy for those on a budget too!

You have noticed that Volker's Scene Editor is implemented in just this way (Horde embedded in QT), right?

Compositing the controls over the OpenGL view is a bit trickier to realise (worse on some platforms than others) - but not impossible by any stretch of the imagination. In the worst case, one can render the QT widgets into an OpenGL framebuffer object, and composite using Horde overlays.

_________________
Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

I didnt remember that no. But now that you mention it, it does make sense.

I do wonder if Cryengine uses QT though.

In terms of tools, it does make a hell of a lot of sense, just to use a windowing framework with a ton of support for other features.

I just wish there was an easier way to create UI's that didnt involve essentially writing QT->native engine control filters. Having said that, if I recall correctly QT takes forever to build

I'll have a look at the editor again and see how the QT->Horde interaction works.

I am fond of JOGL + swing/awt, which have very nice interactions - you can perform OpenGL rendering into/under/over swing controls, and swing controls over/into and OpenGL. Unfortunately it does restrict you to the JVM.

_________________
Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

We have a small tutorial with which it is easy to install Qt and compile the editor: http://www.horde3d.org/wiki/index.php5?title=Horde3D_Scene_Editor#Compiling_the_Editor

What would be interesting is, if it is possible to use a QGraphicsView with an QGLWidget set as viewport, rendering Horde3D as Background and QGraphicsItems as foreground, that would allow an easy integration of Qt's Graphics Items (and wrapped QWidgets using QGraphicsProxyWidget ) for GUIs.

I'm just implementing it, and the horde3d rendering is already possible!
(a good tutorial is: http://doc.trolltech.com/qq/qq26-openglcanvas.html)

qt is really great for doing such things, and i think the qt overlays are alot more useful than the horde overlay system

IMPORTANT EDIT:
I just figured out that calling h3dInit() makes all the overlays drawn by Qt to vanish... I don't know exacly why, but the difference to the QGLWidget is, that the OpenGL context is already initialized in the QGraphicsScene!

I'm now trying to remove some functions from h3dInit() and am going to see wether that works... maybe you can split the graphics initializing from the core engine init functions in the next release?

EDIT
for issues related to QGraphicsView, we can use another thread (viewtopic.php?f=1&t=988)

kind regards,
hs0

Can some1 guide me with simple number of steps that how can i integrate QT with Horde3d Game Engine.

I only want to create four windows using Qt and render my scene on those four windows. with different views left right front and back of
keyboard controlled agent?

I'm using Horde3D with Qt, but not with QtWidgets. See: Integrating Horde3D with QtQuick 1.0. I've upgraded to Qt 5.0 recently. Its a bit more complicated, due to the new rendering architecture of Qt 5.0. I think i can post you some snippets next week, since I couldn't really test my QQuickItem based code, yet