I recently noticed that there is a new release of Qt. I don’t have any personal experience developing games or applications with it, but I’m looking for an API or framework that will simplify creation of GUI for my applications, written in C++ & OpenGL. At this stage I’m less worried about cross-platform, but this is something that I could benefit from in future.
I understand that Qt's real strength lies in its flexibility and cross-platform functionality. Obviously this comes with a trade-off; less control over the main loop.
I have spent a few days pouring over articles and blogs and not really seen much about Qt 5 and the rest of the information regarding Qt seems to point to it not being a great choice for 3D games. I wanted to get a discussion going as most of the information I’ve found seems to be quite dated.
So I guess my questions are:
- Is Qt a viable for 3D application/games development?
- For instance, if I wanted to make a 3D application that had multiple viewports with relevant GUI and a viewport rending a relatively large amount of polys (say 6 million) with some degree of 3D texturing and multiple passes / shaders. Could I use Qt?
From what I’ve read, using GUI elements of Qt seem to take a lot of CPU time. I recognise that there are optimisations you can do within your program, but Qt’s GUI is a big plus and I wouldn’t really want to use Qt if I couldn’t take advantage of it.