Hi all,
I know that many of you would love to just click and download
64k "monster" VT tile sets of the exquisite quality, as resulting from
my F-TexTools / Nmtools. As a main reason for peoples' reluctance of just using these tools themselves, I often read the lack of familiarity with
commandline programs.
Well, in-between coding some Qt GUI stuff for Celestia.Sci, I took a break and started designing and coding a Qt GUI for my tools.
The great advantage of the Qt graphical toolkit is its
cross-platform feature (Windows, Mac OS, Linux) and excellent documentation! For these reasons, after version 1.6.x, Celestia will also enjoy a Qt GUI interface!
Celestia.Sci will include a number of tool applications, like a
catalog & texture loader/unloader, dedicated
plotting tools...and
this GUI for producing "monster" VTs directly from the scientific archives...
In SVN we already have a nicely working Qt version that cleanly compiles in all supported operating systems.
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Before going on with more GUI coding for my tools, I would like to ask for some more feedback about whether people find such a cross-platform GUI enhancement useful!?
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Here is a preview of how the interface will roughly look like. It's essentially a
dockable 2-page toolbox widget structure, the first one for the
base and spec texture tasks, the 2nd page being devoted to the
normalmap generation (nmtools). This will be attached below the standard menue bar with Help etc.
Have a look below, how the GUI for the base & spec texture tasks look in
Linux (Qt Plastic style). In
Windows XP it's essentially the same apart from style aspects.
Please, just have a look whether you can understand the options essentially... I'd be grateful of course for any suggestions that could further simplify the use of my tools...
The present default entries will be just enough to generate in the directory ./BaseTex_VTs_DXT a
complete 64k VT tileset (level0..level5 ) for the base texture with its corresponding spec texture located in the alpha channel.
The VTs will be in highest quality DXT3 format.
Would this be still too complicated?
Fridger
