The Mana World Forums

Thanks for great responses - if you like the concept of particlEd presented above, I'll try to implement it. But I can't promise anything. And sure you'll have to wait long. I have just one evening per week reserved for work on my software projects.

Hi,

Here are just a few ideas for a possible particle editing GUI...

I would suggest to label the properties in the tree view after the properties themself.

It is more important to provide a comfortable user interface than preserving the internals of the xml tree.

Don't know if this was already mentioned but if the program uses code from TMW's base (which is under the GPL license), you are required by the terms of the license to release the source code to your program under the terms of the GPL license. It's not an option as it's a derivitive.

Of course, if it doesn't use any of the code from TMW's source base, none of this applies.

Just FYI...

I know that. I release all software I make under GPL anyway... The first poor program available on my web is not yet a release and so I didn't bother with adding legal stuff. If it is a problem, I'll delete it for now.

Just to inform about progress in development: I decided to use wxWidgets GUI toolkit because it seems to provide clean and simple possibility to bind with SDL (I found a nice example at CODEpendent and it compiles and works without modification), is multiplatform, doesn't have huge set of dependencies and has a friendly license.

igneus wrote:Just to inform about progress in development: I decided to use wxWidgets GUI toolkit because it seems to provide clean and simple possibility to bind with SDL (I found a nice example at CODEpendent and it compiles and works without modification), is multiplatform, doesn't have huge set of dependencies and has a friendly license.

Hmm, why not Qt? It may not bind to SDL, but the drawing part of the particle engine is so small that it would be very easy to replace it with some Qt code anyway. I'm also working on a new version of Tiled based on Qt. It would be very nice if on the long run we could integrate the particle effect editor with this map editor.

Do you think Qt is worth installation and learning? Such a question might seem stupid, but I am non-programmer and person totally new in development of GUI applications. Why did YOU choose Qt for Tiled?

Bjørn wrote:

igneus wrote:Just to inform about progress in development: I decided to use wxWidgets GUI toolkit because it seems to provide clean and simple possibility to bind with SDL (I found a nice example at CODEpendent and it compiles and works without modification), is multiplatform, doesn't have huge set of dependencies and has a friendly license.

Hmm, why not Qt? It may not bind to SDL, but the drawing part of the particle engine is so small that it would be very easy to replace it with some Qt code anyway. I'm also working on a new version of Tiled based on Qt. It would be very nice if on the long run we could integrate the particle effect editor with this map editor.

Shocker an employee at Trolltech wants to use Qt.

EDIT- If you want to use Qt, by all means please. It will work better with my KDE desktop. I think XULRunner might be a better choice though for independent theming.

igneus wrote:Do you think Qt is worth installation and learning? Such a question might seem stupid, but I am non-programmer and person totally new in development of GUI applications. Why did YOU choose Qt for Tiled?

I chose Qt for a remake of Tiled since it suits be better for development than Java currently. Of course this is partly because I already use Qt 40 hours a week professionally while working at Nokia, Qt Software (Trolltech), but it's also because Qt is in my opinion superior in many ways to Java Swing. It is more feature-complete, has better native system integration and it's easier to do GUI layouting. Of course not everybody will agree with me.

If I were to compare Qt to other alternatives like GTK or wxWidgets, well... it is my impression that Qt is vastly superior and easier to use than either of those. But I have to admit I never really tried to develop using those toolkits. I can only note that the GUI of the latest version of VLC is based on Qt instead of wxWidgets, and the developers have been quite positive about it.

Ok, thank you. My PC is currently having hard time compiling Qt from source.
I'll give it a try and it isn't impossible that particlEd will use Qt as it's GUI toolkit instead of wxWidgets.

I wasn't successfull in Qt compilation and don't want to try any more; moving back to wxWidgets.

After all it seems that binding SDL with any external GUI libraries is always somehow dirty (GTK+) or I am not able to compile that library (Qt) or results don't work as they should (wxWidgets with "naked X" or motif backend).
I consider using Guichan: I managed to compile it (unlike TMW client ) and there is no need to make any dirty bindings with SDL because Guichan uses SDL as it's backend.

I asked Google to find any site with custom widgets, but poor boy couldn't find anything. Either he didn't understand me well or there doesn't exist any such resource. Then it will be a real challenge for me, total Guichan beginner, to implement tree view of the particle effect somehow.

ParticlEd's home is currently at github:
http://github.com/igneus/particled/tree/master

Has this been dead since February?

Anyone care to pick up?