Category: General

Open Horizon Mission Editor

editor_screenshot2It’s finished at some point. Of course it’s kinda useless right now, as you can’t see the result in game yet, but I wanted to release it anyway so people can make suggestions. Like, what else is required to remake AC5 missions?

You could find some documentation here. Don’t expect to have undo/redo and copy-paste in this release, it’s complicated.

Using QtQuick/QML for games.

In games with complex UI, creating a library that supports that UI and tools that allow designers quickly iterate changes could be a daunting and a time-consuming task. A task that you’d like to solve once and forever, and not write a new solution for each new project, or even for each new company you work at. Life, as it can be said, is too short to roll your own UI libraries!

So, in desperation, you begin to search for a third-party universal UI library. Once, this was the domain of CEGui and the like, but the current generation of game-specific UI frameworks is dominated by Scaleform and Coherent UI. Although, if HTML-based UI is what you want, you may simply choose Awesomium.

Unfortunately, this trio has some problems with performance, especially apparent on mobile devices. Just a few years ago, I’ve seen a nearly empty screen rendered with Scaleform take up 50% of frame time on iPhone4.

So, I always wondered why does no one use Qt for game UI – a library that is well known for being one of the less-fucked-up UI toolkits for desktop applications. This is not actually entirely true – a list on Qt Project Wiki has some games that do use it, but it’s mostly open source, small-time projects or ports of old games.

Of course, it’s obvious why you wouldn’t use Qt Desktop Widgets in a game. They are not at all suited for hardware-accelerated rendering, and while you may try to work around this problem, it’s far more troubles than its worth. However, for a long time, Qt had a different library, the one that allows drawing hardware-accelerated widgets: QtQuick.

Not only it is said to be specifically targeted at mobile devices, it also has a very nice text format for describing UI screens, which is well-suited for quick iteration.

Still, I have never yet heard of a professional game developer using QtQuick. As I could find no posts or articles that could give me the reason for this, I just had to check it out for myself.
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Open Horizon progress demonstration 5

There are a lot of tasks done in this version, like collisions, hud and special weapons, but the most important is that since this release Open Horizon finally feels like an Ace Combat game. It’s not yet feature complete, but already playable and fun.

This release also featuring experimental multiplayer, but don’t expect much – this is the first row implementation and requires a lot of additional work, so expect lags and report bugs.

There is no more requirement to run Open Horizon from ACAH folder, you can run it from other location and will be asked to specify resources path.

Download: Open Horizon 5th Demo

My experience with Ubuntu Touch development.



It’s been a while since I bought myself a Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition phone, but I finally found time and motivation to learn more about this new mobile platform from Canonical. I chose to port Allegro game library and my pet project, Return of Dr. Destructo, which is presently also nearing release on iOS and Android as a commercial app, to that platform. This post, however, won’t be very specific to my own projects, but can be used as a general set of answers to some problems with Ubuntu Touch-targeted development of OpenGL apps.

The worst thing about developing for a new platform is lack of coherent documentation. Even Windows Phone, with MSDN and Microsoft’s large workforce had this problem in the beginning, as it was impossible to google answers to even the simplest questions. In this post, I will try do document some peculiarities, problems and solutions of developing an OpenGL application (namely, a game) for Ubuntu Touch. If you’re more interested in developing apps with native UI (QML, QtQuick), then it will be slightly less useful to you, but you may still find something here.

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