A 64 bit base will be huge. Hopefully hardware doesnt put the screws to that.....

Hi Burr, what are you thinking of re: hardware?

Do you mean you have some 32-bit only machines you are still using?

- Michael

I agree about the focus on 64-bit as the priority. Just wondering, will you also be looking at a multi-platform native codebase or still planning on using Wine for Mac, or too early to say?

Hi Chipp - yes having a 64-bit multi-platform base using Qt would be the main goal for the restructuring. I would like to get away from using Wine for the Mac version. There will be quite a bit of work involved though so there is a chance that it won't be successful, I won't really know until I'm into it with a few months of effort.

One of the big problems with Wine is that it does not support 64-bit on OSX and probably never will because of low level execution model differences between 64-bit windows programs and 64-bit OSX programs. That's the really big stumbling block that makes it difficult to continue to try and use Wine, but there are several other problems as well.

If Wine had worked out a little bit better there could have been some nice benefits in using it, like having binary plug-ins that ran on all MoI versions without developers needing to build multiple versions. I had kind of hoped to have that, it could have been nice. But Wine is itself mostly focused on running on Linux, it involves sort of a lot of halfway supported pieces for it to run on OSX.

- Michael

Hi Michael, just out of couriosity you talk about this Qt http://www.qt.io/download/
with $150 per month subscription for commercial purposes?

It looks like it would allow to keep the current UI in HTML?

-Martin

Hi Martin,

> Hi Michael, just out of couriosity you talk about this Qt http://www.qt.io/download/
> with $150 per month subscription for commercial purposes?

Yes that's the same Qt that I'm referring to, but the open source license it has also allows use for commercial programs as well.

MoI since v3 already uses Qt for the HTML engine. There was a major restructuring from MoI v2 to v3 which involved switching from using the Internet Explorer HTML engine to using the WebKit HTML engine supplied by QtWebKit. The next level is to port more mechanisms over to use Qt as well for frame windows, event handling, timers, etc... and then a big item is to port the graphics engine from Direct3D to OpenGL. One of the best parts of Wine was that it has a very good built in translation from Direct3D to OpenGL which made it possible for me to avoid that work previously but with a native compiled Mac version I would need to have MoI make OpenGL calls on the Mac instead of the current calls into the Direct3D API.


> It looks like it would allow to keep the current UI in HTML?

Yup, that's what I would be going for.

- Michael

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the big benefits of Qt that it is supposed to be multi-platform? So theoretically, if the program was written in Qt, it shouldn't be hard to port between the major desktop platforms?

Hi Dan,

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the big benefits of Qt that it is
> supposed to be multi-platform?

Yup, that's one of the main things about Qt.


> So theoretically, if the program was written in Qt, it shouldn't be hard to port
> between the major desktop platforms?

In theory yes, but in practice it's not anywhere as simple as just setting some checkbox option - each different platform tends to have a lot of its own platform specific quirks that need addressing and also just the support work needed for testing and building on a new platform is a significant amount of work itself.

The main goal of this cross platform work that I'm talking about would be to get a more reliable and higher quality Mac version, not really for expanding to other additional platforms although it is certainly not a bad side effect that it would also make it easier to go to other platforms in the future at some point, if there is enough demand for them to justify the amount of time it takes for all the extra work involved.

- Michael

I've done a little programming with Qt, but only fairly simple little applications. I'm sure with a big graphics-oriented project like MoI there are a lot more platform-specific things to worry about. Anyway, I was just wondering about that, but I'm perfectly okay with using Wine anyway.

""""""""""""Hi Burr, what are you thinking of re: hardware?
Do you mean you have some 32-bit only machines you are still using?""""""""""""""

No. I was referring to your long term visions being hit by some type of Intel (name your hardware here) announcement about processors/architectures etc.........

Hi Burr,

> No. I was referring to your long term visions being hit by some type of Intel (name your
> hardware here) announcement about processors/architectures etc.........

Well, having things on a more cross platform base would probably be better situated to deal with something like that as well I guess...

- Michael