Packages, Qt 5, and OS X HiDPI

edited 2014 Aug 3 in Developers
I have merged most of what I've been working on for the past several weeks to the master branch. This includes basic functionality for native Doomsday resource packages, OS X HiDPI support, a switch to Qt 5.

Packages

Packages are a very important new concept that relates to resource management. I've been discussing them on my blog:
While the basic implementation of packages is now in the master, they aren't yet exposed very visibly to you. If you take a look at the data folder, you'll find a bunch of new .pack files (ZIP archives), however at the moment they are automatically loaded by Doomsday, and there is no interactivity of any kind in the process.

So far the only supported package format is the new Doomsday 2 native package, however the plan is to make the engine later on understand Snowberry packages (addon bundles, boxes) as well. Also other loadable files, such as WADs, are planned to be handled via the same package system internally.

With this new functionality in place, I am now free to proceed to next-gen 3D model rendering, using the new packages as a basis for storing model files and definitions.

Qt 5

In the 1.15 release we are finally switching to the latest version of Qt (from 4.8 to 5.3). This is great as the version of Qt we've been using has not been the focus of Qt development for some time now, and with Qt 5 we'll get support for the latest features and bug fixes.

On Windows, this also means we are significantly upgrading the compiler used for building Doomsday (to MSVC 2013). Hopefully the improved compiler will ease our burdens of keeping all the platforms working as they should.

However, I fully expect that the next few builds will either not work or will malfunction in other ways. We'll navigate these rough waters soon enough, though, and try to sort out any issues in upcoming builds.

When it comes to Linux, it is important to note that older distributions typically only support Qt 4 out of the box. We are thinking about limiting the prebuilt binaries to Ubuntu 14.04 (latest LTS) and/or the sjke/doomsday PPA. In any case, manual Qt 4 builds should remain possible at least in 1.15.

OS X HiDPI

Finally, something I am very happy about: proper support for HiDPI resolutions on OS X. If you have a retina screen, Doomsday will now take full advantage of it. Also, the OS X fullscreen mode works appropriately. The downside is that for the time being, it is no longer possible to adjust the display resolution within Doomsday on OS X; this will be replaced with another solution that doesn't require changing the desktop resolution.

A screenshot of Doomsday's UI on a retina display can be seen on my blog.

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