The Qt life of a Troglodtye

This is the first blog post of 2009. I'm excited to be in a new year and am looking forward to making this the most successful and productive year yet. Last year there was a pretty steady increase in my blogging habits. I ended up with 48 which averages out to one post a week. This year I have a blogging goal of 100, all rich with useful information in content.

So, I've been diving into the world of Qt the last few days, and so far, I have to say that I'm very impressed. I've been looking for an alternative to MFC on windows for a long time, but never really wanted to get into .net coding. It has also been a goal to make Troglodyte cross-platform from the very beginning, but I was never really sure how to do it. While I currently don't have a Linux or Mac box to compile my projects on, using Qt at least provides the frame work for me to be able to do so in the future.

In addition to using Qt, I'm also in the process of learning their custom IDE Qt Creator and I have to say I like it very much so far. It's still in Beta, but it's pretty functional. The IDE can be setup to use various compilers, but comes setup with the GNU GCC, which I haven't messed with since I first started to learn C++ six years ago. I have to say I'm fairly pleased with the compiler as well.

I've been wanting to get away from Microsoft specific products for sometime for various reasons. Don't get me wrong. I like the products that Microsoft makes. I've enjoyed using visual studio for the length of time that I have, but what I have never really liked is how Microsoft has seemingly set out to Monopolize the markets that they are in. Collaborative work and allowing others to learn from what you have done allows for true progress to be made. While Microsoft has gotten a little better due to pressure from government agencies and users themselves, it still seems like things will always be in a certain light from Microsoft. I'll continue to use Microsoft products such as windows(as long as the Windows7 doesn't go the way of the vista) and as a software developer will be required too as it's still the major piece of the market pie.

The main reason for wanting to switch however is simply to be able to cater to the rest of the market. As well as use tools with little to no restrictions that I don't have to worry about licensing issues and I can share with the community that I'm hoping to build around the game engine. In addition Qt Creator is light weight and provides support for C++ which is the only language that I develop in, besides python.

So, as I've been learning Qt, I have to say that I'm very impressed. There is functionality put into these collection of libraries that will not only allow for simple cross-platform compilation and serialization issues, but also allow for things such as resolution of localization issues and rapid application development. I'm hoping that this will cut down development time on the editor by more then half.

The website is still coming along, as well as the tournament connection system for the GoG. I'm going to try and get the majority of the remaining design knocked out for that system today. It's great to finally have a couple of consecutive days off from work to get things done.