DevalVR support

Devalvr is a most impressive piece of work (and I speak as a 40 years s/w engineer). Now all that is needed for perfect happiness is a version that runs on Linux. Any possibility of that? Could I help make it happen?
Regards, Tom

Hi Tom,

Thank you for your comment

I'm working in Mac version, but my work is very slow because I'm a beginner in Mac and Linux.

I installed Ubuntu 8 in a computer some time ago and tested Eclipse+GCC, but I have a lot of things to learn yet. Do you advice me Eclipse IDE to work in Linux?

I work in Windows with VisualStudio 6 and I did not find a similar IDE for Mac or Linux.

Hi Fiero

I am an MSVC user of many years, and I like the KDevelop IDE on Linux. Don't know any others. No IDE supports the programmer as nicely as MSVC does, and debugging with gdb is a miserable experience compared to MSVC. But it gets the job done.

It seems to me (not having done it) that porting a browser plugin would be mainly a matter of adapting to the OpenGL facilities of the different platforms, which GLUT should make quite painless, and a few small differences in how status messages etc. might be displayed. But yours has some GUI features, and also exists as a GUI program; so maybe you need a portable GUI building package. In which case I heartily recommend Qt.

Qt builds for Mac, Windows, Linux, and others; is widely used (including by big commercial developers such as Google); is fully GPL for noncommercial open source users; is well supported by good design and development tools (notably KDevelop on Linux); has a very clean and easy to understand windowing and event-driven widgets model; and has built in full OpenGL support on all platforms. All in all a terrific package.

And I do believe you can use Qt just to work with an OpenGL viewport, without having to create any "main window" or "dialog box".

So I suggest you look into Qt. The best way would be to install Qt on Windows and try porting key parts of Devalvr to it. You can still use the VC IDE for coding, and it is possible the Qt build system integrates with it fully -- I don't know details as I have only used Qt on Linux so far, but I know Windows is a highly supported environment for Qt.

If this port on Windows works, you will automatically have 99.9% of a Mac or Linux port finished.

A few things to think about. 1) To use Qt code commercially you must have developed it all under a paid-for commercial license -- no conversion from open source is allowed. So if you plan to sell DevalVr code you might have to finance that. 2) Qt supports full unicode, automatic translation, and so on, but of course only if you use their special string classes for everything the user sees. I know you have made a Unicode version of DevalVR, probably a lot of that would have to be redone.

But do take a look at this possibility.

Another possibility is to ask people who do know Mac and Linux to port DevalVR for you. But that means creating three separate versions that will never be in sync again.

Anyhow I do hope somehow soon to see DevalVR on Linux.

Best regards, Tom

The DevalVR standalone works under Wine in Linux. I am using Linux Mint 9.
Also, the Plugin (Ver. 0.8.0.2) works in Firefox (Ver. 3.6.10) under Virtualbox (Ver. 3.2.4).