Avalanche

Thanks to some comments on my last post, I've been considering using WTL for the GUI of my editor component. After experimenting with Qt, and minimally with MFC, it's very much getting back to the basics, which at this point seems very attractive to me. Qt and MFC both felt a little bloated, with tons of utility classes that you kind of get talked into using as if by some used car salesman. Because of this, it made me feel like I should have been maintaining a more generic interface between the actual GUI part of things and the core editor code in case I wanted to bale out on the GUI toolkit I was using without heavily refactoring the existing editor. I'm thinking now that there were more productive things to worry about rather than writing perfectly designed, loosely coupled, highly componentized code right out of the gate. I put quite a bit of exploration into trying to make Qt work for me, but the only thing I have to show for it is a lesson learned: get it to work first, then get it to work well, then finally make it pretty. Past lessons learned also are telling me not to stick to this too closely and just slop stuff together in an unmaintainable mess, rather gradually assimilate new concepts, refine, and slightly refocus.

For the next milestone, I plan to wire up a demo component into my existing rendering framework for use when integrating it into the skeleton WTL application I currently have set up. This will just be a spinning cube and a frame time to make sure everything's going to rendering and updating correctly when integrated with the editor. I hope to quickly get things to where there is something interesting to show as people (myself included) generally get more excited over pictures than a bunch of words.

As for the title of this post, I've also decided to officially name this project Avalanche. I've always just liked the sound of it from Final Fantasy 7.