Hi,
I thought I'd step into this thread, maybe you can benefit from our learnings..
We have also been seeing issues with qrc in our projects, and the default Qt implementation has a couple of disadvantages:
It is ugly to have to change the qrc:/ scheme in all your images - ideally you would not need to change the scheme when you switch between qrc and non-qrc
Qrc has problems if the size of all combined images gets bigger than 50MB. Thus ideally you would ship the image assets separately as non-qrc, and use qrc for your qml files (to protect them from outside use). However, you still should have the option to also put the assets into qrc, if exposing your image files is a problem.
That's exactly what we allow to do in V-Play: the QML & JS files are put into qrc files (this also makes sure no one can read your source code) – the assets are put into an own assets folder and are deployed with DEPLOYMENTFOLDERS += assets in the .pro file. You can also use qrc for assets if your prefer, but it has some limitations like the 50MB limit).
That way, you don’t have the size limitation of qrc files (at above ~50MB qrc hangs).
Also, during development working with DEPLOYMENTFOLDERS is better on Desktop, because you can just re-run your application and dont need to recompile.
What we did additionally, is to abstract the file access, i.e. you dont need a prefix assets:/… for your images, or mix up your code with any qrc:/… prefixes.
You can have a look at some .pro files of our games by downloading the "V-Play SDK":http://v-play.net and then check out the <QtSDK>/examples/V-Play/demos directory.
I’ve also posted some comments about the qrc approach set as default since Qt Creator 3.1 on the Qt Blog, maybe that’s interesting to the pros and cons of it (and why I think it’s bad..):
http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2014/03/04/qt-creator-3-1-beta-released/#comment-1193034
Hope that helps,
Chris