Those of you who frequent the #scp channel on Discord probably already know this but for the past few months there has been an ongoing effort to port the Windows only FRED code to the cross-platform UI framework
Qt. This has actually been quite successful which allowed us to merge the current state of the project into the master branch instead of keeping it in a separate branch of the repository. Don't worry, the standard FRED won't go anywhere for some time since qtFRED is still lacking a lot of features.
The project began when the forum user groscask began porting the existing FRED rendering code to the Qt platform. He was very successful in this undertaking and managed to get a version working which allowed to view missions natively on platforms other than Windows. Unfortunately, he was unable to continue developing the project so development pretty much fell dormant at some point. Then (according to the git logs) at the end of May 2017 I restarted development on the project based on the excellent ground work done by groscask. I fixed the code so that it works with the now updated version of the FSO code and soon after I was joined by DahBlount and z64555.
We continued porting code from the FRED codebase and started to make a lot of progress towards making qtFRED an actual editor. Currently the following features are supported:
- Moving, adding and deleting ships
- Changing the view options of the FRED renderer
- Various smaller editor dialogs
- Mission spec editor is fully functional
- Displaying the SEXP Tree in a tree widget is possible
Test buildsThese builds are updated occasionally when there is something to test.
That is all for the moment. We will post updates here when there are news.
Finally, here are some screenshots of qtFRED in action. These pictures were taken on Linux which already shows that cross-platform compatibility is a thing with qtFRED:
Fully functional mission Specs editor dialog:
Event editor with SEXP tree: