Re: [Flightgear-devel] PUI replacement (was: nasal module gui present but not configured?)

[James T. <ja...@fl...>]

> On 2 Sep 2022, at 07:46, Andreas Mueller <alp...@gm...> wrote:
> 
> What are the current plans for a PUI replacement?
> Qt or something more light weight?


It was going to be Qt but it started to get very complicated with changes in Qt 5.15 + Qt 6, so I’m going with a more light-weight approach now.

Qt added support for Vulkan / Metal / D3D starting in 5.15, but FlightGear / OpenSceneGraph can’t support those, so integrating the two renderers went from being ‘complicated but ok’  to ‘very very complicated’.  (If for some reason anyone wants the code to render Qt Quick in OpenGL mode into OpenSceneGraph, I have it working nicely on a branch, from about two years ago...)

So now i’m going with something much lightweight using some C++ compatibility code, some Nasal for styling and the existing widget rendering from Thomas with some extensions and additions: some pieces are in FlightGear & FGData already. I have basic dialogs working okay but not the more complex ones and everything looks kind of ugly, I need to improve the visual look before I share screenshots to avoid everyone freaking out :) The disadvantage of this approach is I’m far from expert at creating visual appearances this way, so it’s kind on unrewarding and slow for me. If someone likes messing with CSS-type styling, border-images and hover-states, ping me since we could probably move things also faster :)

Kind regards,
James