Qt3D - what can I say about it?
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A few months ago I embarked on a Masters project in visualisation. At the suggestion of my supervising lecturer I adopted Qt as a platform to work on. On further investigation I discovered Qt3D and took the chance that I could fast track some of my work with things like QGLView, QGLSceneNode, etc. so I could concentrate on the meat of my project and the visualisations I was trying to achieve.
I know there was a risk using Qt3D given it's age - only available since 2009. What I didn't realise at the time was the work from Qt4.8 to 5.0 ground to a halt on Qt3D and I have seen very little traffic on forums and little or no response to topics I raised. I further complicated my choice I think by choosing the Mac OS as my development platform - but then again - QT is cross platform, right?
So, I achieved some of my basic project goals, but frequently ran into basic Qt3D / openGL issues which by any text book should work. I'm no expert on openGL but it appears to me, I may have been better off developing using glut / windows / openGL and not bothering with Qt and Qt3D.
Long way of asking the question: What is the future of Qt3d - really? I've read it will start evolving again after Qt 5.0 is released... so has any work started? It seems to me with such a rich and flexible platform like Qt, it is a shame to leave 3D out in the cold...
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Hi,
I'm sorry to hear that you've face an uphill battle with Qt 3D. -Unfortunately, there isn't much attention given to it at the moment. Time and manpower are limited, even with Digia's commercial backing, and other things have been given higher priority. Here's a list of the most recent patches merged into the module: https://codereview.qt-project.org/#q,status:merged+project:qt/qt3d,n,z- EDIT: Wrong info, sorry
If you want to talk to Qt's engineers themselves, subscribe to and post to the "Development mailing list":http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/development
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The existing Qt3D is being rewritten at present to address many of the shortcomings of the current implementation. We are making good progress now and hope to push to a public repo in the near future. I posted about our outlines for a future Qt3D on the mailing list "here":http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2013-February/009853.html.
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Ah, I had forgotten about that email. Great to hear!
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We're slowly getting there but it's non-trivial to make it extensible for what we want to add in the future.
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Hi,
Nice to hear you are making progress on Qt3D. Are you rather optimistic or pessimistic regarding inclusion/usability in Qt5.2 ?
Thanks. -
We're hoping for a tech preview with 5.2.
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Thanks for the reply, sounds encouraging. I'll check out the mailing list.
