I'm trying to move the development more and more towards windows, but little success so far. The reason behind developing on windows is that the vast majority of users are on windows. And windows users expect fundamentally different approach to final application than Linux users - namely, graphical. While HydraNode works (somewhat) on Linux, it doesn't work at all on windows. Yes, it does compile, yes it does run, but no, it does not work. Because it's missing anything even resembling a graphical interface, and doing stuff in windows console just doesn't cut it.

So I'v been trying to cook up some kind of shell, along with some controls to help with further development - constantly parsing pages and pages of trace output in console got rather tedious a long time ago.

The GUI library choice pretty much came down to QT, after their announcement that QT4 for Windows will be released under GPL in late Q2/2005. First impressions on QT library were very positive - things that I had spent several days trying to get working with wxWidgets worked right out of the box. However, there are limitations.

Namely, one idea was to compile the engine to a dll, and link GUI against it. With this approach, the GUI could do direct core function calls, subscribe to core events directly using core event engine, etc, giving very fast responsiveness. However, I quickly discovered that QT's preprocessor, Moc, breaks on Boost headers, namely, Boost.Signal ones, which is not very surprising. There are means of working around it, for example, by not including any hydranode headers from moc'ed GUI headers, however, it quickly leads into one big pile of mess.

As an afterthought, I realized the idea wouldn't have worked anyway, since it would'v broken remote GUI capabilities anyway. The only reason for attempting this was to tie the engine and GUI together for windows platform only, in order to allow easier development/debugging, however, seems it's a no-go.

So, the GUI still needs to do everything it needs to do over Core/GUI communication layer, and that layer must simply provide a ton of features required by modern user interfaces, that windows users expect.

Madcat, ZzZz