Open ModPlug Tracker for Linux?

Saga Musix · February 27, 2010, 13:06:29

QuoteModplug was made for windows

Says the Windows users. It almost sounds like you don't want to have Modplug on other platforms, while that is one of the most important steps for me in future development.

QuoteI don't see why changing to a more modern and flexible user interface would do so much harm. Also I'm not so sure qt is so fast as you want it to be.

WPF is slow. WPF is only official supported on Windows (since .NET is not official supported on any non-M$ product). WPF relies on DirectX.
Qt on the other hand is supported on a wide variety of platforms, does not need .Net (thus, modplug does not need to be ported to .Net) and has multimedia extensions like OpenGL (which I would make use of instantly).

Rakib · February 27, 2010, 16:06:32

Im not telling you to use wpf, but it is a great tool for designing UI. Today wine has support for direct3d. And with mono you can compile for mac and linux. But a big minus is that .net framework doesn't support windows 2000.

But reading more about qt, I'm more convinced about qt with its integration in VS2008 and speed and multithread support. But have you also looked at gtk and xwidgets?

Saga Musix · February 27, 2010, 20:24:22

GTK on Windows is... so-so. It might be faster on Gnome-based systems, but Qt has a lot better, native looking integration on most platforms (f.e. it does not come with a bad-looking file selection dialog like GTK has it). Apart from that, nothing has been decided yet, but it will most likely be Qt.

QuoteBut a big minus is that .net framework doesn't support windows 2000.

Actually, early versions supported W2k, afaik. But I know that there are still quite a few people out there using ModPlug on old systems, and I would not want to cut off support for those that way.

QuoteToday wine has support for direct3d.

Yeah, but I personally find D3D a lot more difficult to get into than OpenGL. That's just a personal preference, but so is Qt and I guess in the end it matters what the developer(s) like(s), and that's OpenGL in my case.

Louigi Verona · March 01, 2010, 09:13:33

Quote from: "Jojo"
Less then you maybe think. "Only" the interface is bound to MFC, and there's usage of the WinAPI here and there, but it should really not be too complicated to switch over to Qt, if enough people are willing to help - which is the only real constraint in my view. Apart from that, a switch would open many new possibilites, for example a sample / envelope editor based on OpenGL, which would allow a lot more flexibility.
I'm not saying it's a trivial task, but there are enough helper classes to make the transition a bit easier.

Good to know!
Well, maybe in the future MPT will make it to Linux. I would certainly favour that a lot. With Renoise being proprietary, there are not many sophisticated trackers for the platform.

darwin · March 01, 2010, 10:24:17

Quote from: "Jojo"[...]Less then you maybe think. "Only" the interface is bound to MFC, and there's usage of the WinAPI here and there, but it should really not be too complicated to switch over to Qt, if enough people are willing to help - which is the only real constraint in my view. Apart from that, a switch would open many new possibilites, for example a sample / envelope editor based on OpenGL, which would allow a lot more flexibility.
I'm not saying it's a trivial task, but there are enough helper classes to make the transition a bit easier.

Since the days of FT][ I always wanted to work on a tracker, but the death of DOS and the wider acceptance of computers with windowing environments decreased my interest in programming and I broadened my studies to the rest of the field of math. Now I forgot almost everything I know about programming, and though in the last few years I may have done intermediate OOP, I did not really get into any OOP language as deep as I should have because for a while I wanted to learn what I had missed of C. What would I have to do to be able to work on OMPT? I forgot what language it is in, but besides my first learning language I have used x86 asm, C, C++, Java, C# and a little various scripting.

Rakib · March 01, 2010, 12:41:43

If recall correctly Modplug is made of mostly c++ and some asm.

Saga Musix · March 01, 2010, 16:05:36

Well, the asm code is uninteresting for now - first think about getting rid of MFC, then getting rid of Windows, and then getting rid of the x86 platform is a good idea (but it will take a long time

). The biggest part of MPT is written in C++, most parts of it are object oriented (though, due to its age, you might feel comfortable with some parts, which are still from the old DOS days...).

Relabsoluness · March 01, 2010, 20:12:09

Quote from: "darwin"What would I have to do to be able to work on OMPT?

A less ambitious alternative to getting rid of MFC, Windows and x86 is getting Visual Studio(C++) 2003 or later.

Rakib · March 13, 2010, 00:23:06

I was watching a video on a norwegian tech-news page where the community manager of QT was presenting some features from QT. But got to know that QT has it's own framework for people who wants to migrate from mfc/win32 to QT. I hope this will be of some interest for the developers.

http://qt.nokia.com/products/appdev/add-on-products/catalog/4/Windows/qtwinmigrate/

And for those who understand norwegian, here is the video.
http://www.digi.no/837724/hva-er-egentlig-qt

Saga Musix · March 13, 2010, 00:25:23

Yeah, I'm aware of the migration framework, and I guess we will use this.

Pesho_Zmiata · March 13, 2010, 11:37:35

By the way OpenMPT works successfully on ReactOS's Arwinss builds now. I've been able to run some VSTi's, but sound support is poor so i couldnt test it.

Sir Gallantmon · March 22, 2010, 14:32:01

Can the source code build without the UI itself? Or is OpenMPT's logic code totally integrated into the UI code?

Saga Musix · March 22, 2010, 14:34:05

If you compile OpenMPT without the UI, you get libmodplug. Apart from that, please define "logic code".

Relabsoluness · March 22, 2010, 21:12:04

Quote from: "Sir Gallantmon"Can the source code build without the UI itself? Or is OpenMPT's logic code totally integrated into the UI code?

Source can't be build without the UI. Soundlib and UI are somewhat separate parts, but most of the editing code is integrated in the methods of UI classes.

Really Weird Person · March 23, 2010, 04:19:29

A program without a user interface (UI) would not be much of a program. All programs that I know of have a user interface, but many programs anymore have a graphical user interface (GUI) (as opposed to a text driven one or perhaps even a mouse driven one).