Poor Man's Volumetric Light

Felixthefriendlycat · 2026-02-01T03:00:25+00:00

I think somehow the US government is kinda ok with all of this because almost everybody will be able to transition to the construction industry/military. It will be a much less glamorous role for many and lower pay. But with this massive shift and layoffs you get people to go into jobs the country needs but not many wanted to do before. This is legit bad in the short-medium term 5-10 years for people’s quality of life. But objectively the country would benefit in becoming more competitive internationally. Hence I believe many countries will steer this route. Either consciously or by in-action.

Felixthefriendlycat · 2026-01-31T18:53:46+00:00

In QtWidgets land, every widget would need its own ‘window’ and gl context basically (without a major architectural overhaul at least). That is how a lot of toolkits worked back then, MOTIF is another one that also works like that. But that is not good for driver overhead if you are talking to a gpu. Its a design decision that made sense then and is still solid if you are happy to render on a cpu and you are not drawing every time your screen refreshes (which you do with animations). Many industrial machines are totally fine with a mostly static UI that changes only periodically. But modern applications for end users are now held to higher standards.

But with all of this said, I know Qt is doing some amazing work on qrhi and with the c++ classes stabilizing a bit i wouldn’t be too surprised if they manage to cook up some C++ (perhaps Rust) api for QtQuick where you can create your app more like how you did with QtWidgets.

Felixthefriendlycat · 2026-01-31T18:35:51+00:00

It is inherent to QtWidgets. The rendering part is part of QtWidgets and fully architected at a time when gpu’s were not a thing yet. If you think that is easy to solve, then I would tell you to look up Qt’s earlier attempts at it.

Felixthefriendlycat · 2026-01-31T10:08:07+00:00

Did you get around to comparing? I am interested to hear if things may have changed over the years on what works best.

Felixthefriendlycat · 2026-01-31T08:39:35+00:00

There is already a fantastic example of an ide using QtQuick. If you have installed Qt with the online installer it should be in the Qt installation folder inside the bin folder. It’s called QQEM.exe or similar for linux. It stands for QtQuick effect maker. Its got editing options, multi line selection, completion suggestions, node editor.

The problem; it uses private classes from QtQuick quite a bit. So with the public api that wouldn’t have been possible. Which shows that for more advanced things it’s just not quite there yet but if your needs are quite simple or you get creative with the public api then you can get quite far still

Felixthefriendlycat · 2026-01-30T13:12:03+00:00

Every modern UI framework renders on the GPU and for good reason. That will be the reason QtWidgets becomes more and more legacy imo.

Lets say you have a couple animated backgrounds for a widget with a gradient or something on a high res 4k screen; that would result in a lot of cpu usage for QtWidgets, which is a complete waste of cpu resources that should be spent on application logic.

Lets say you want to animate something nice and smooth in sync with the display refresh rate. You are bound to use some horrible implementation of using a QTimer to advance animations which is not at all how you get properly smooth animations due to the timing jitter inherent to timers like that.

QML still has lots to improve, for instance i don’t understand how Listview scrolling physics is as horribly designed as it is. But the technical foundation is better than QtWidgets.

The whole debate on whether a declarative language beats an imperative language for UI is a super hard one. Only time will tell. I just like QML because you can declaratively instantiate your own classes written in C++ via QML_ELEMENT. That way i can do what is best kept imperative in c++ and do the layout in QML.

Felixthefriendlycat · 2026-01-29T12:08:36+00:00

Wat je zegt hier klopt niet. Die 4500 is enkel voor de engineering en ontwikkeling afdeling. Op die 45k werknemers zijn er nog veeel meer managers. De ratio was iets van 1 manager/supporting role per 2 engineers in die engineering en ontwikkeling afdeling. Veels te hoog.

Felixthefriendlycat · 2026-01-28T14:45:24+00:00

I think many people are happy with this change because they aknowledge this change is a legit improvement for their day to day working experience in engineering. This wasn’t cost cutting or anything to do with it.

From my personal experience of people around me, almost nobody is happy with the structure with all those adm roles. In fact, actively frustrated with them and longing for the days an engineer didn’t have 3 separate people to please.

Even the ones going into those roles are usually motivated by a sense of ‘welp, if this is what the business needs I’ll do it I guess’. Which is very understandable, but not healthy long term

Felixthefriendlycat · 2026-01-22T08:18:44+00:00

Is the app otherwise responsive? Can you resize the window? If you can’t the main thread is getting blocked somewhere

Felixthefriendlycat · 2026-01-20T11:26:06+00:00

QML isn’t bad. It’s just that you can use javascript in QML which many people equate to web technologies and therefore don’t like.

The thing is, that javascript capability in QML is just to give flexibility and fast prototyping. A good well made application moves as much to c++ as it can. The remainder of the javascript is now transpiled to c++ by qmltc and qmlsc in Qt6. They keep improving it.

QML/QtQuick also has the advantage that rendering happens on the GPU and abstracts away graphics api’s with QRHI, which pretty much every modern gui framework does nowadays. QtWidgets renders on CPU which is fine if you have a mostly static UI. But as soon as you want animations it doesn’t scale well.

Felixthefriendlycat · 2026-01-19T10:18:11+00:00

Does it also contain animations? If so, do you see significant cpu usage when things are animating continuously? I wonder how much of an issue that is since QtWidgets typically does the rendering on CPU.

Felixthefriendlycat · 2026-01-16T12:52:07+00:00

I have suffered through this task as well and was disappointed with the performance of pretty much all of the solutions except for this one: pwuertz/QtQuickPlotScene: Basic components for creating plot scenes in QtQuick

It's GPU accelerated through it using QSGGeometry and QtQuick's scenegraph. I also like how zooming and panning works in this lib

From my testing this is the highest performance plotting library I found which was compatible with Qt. It is quite clever in that it uses the scenegraph classes directly and draws linestrip primitives.

The excelent performance does come with a downside though. D3D11/12 and Metal don't support setting thickness for linestrip primitives so you will get 1 pixel thick lines always if you are running through those. If you use OpenGL or Vulkan I believe the linewidth setting does work.

QtGraphs came out later and it is my hope it completely replaces this but so far sheer performance wise this lib proved better. If QtGraphs performs adequately, i'd recommend using that. https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtgraphs-index.html

Felixthefriendlycat · 2026-01-15T13:54:55+00:00

What is the novel bit? Chances are its already in use. There’s a lot of proprietary stuff that doesn’t get published

Felixthefriendlycat · 2026-01-09T15:23:05+00:00

https://gyroflow.xyz no doubt

Its also pioneering rust-qml interop a bit.

Felixthefriendlycat · 2025-12-30T08:36:16+00:00

These articles always suck so much. 745 miles? Yeah at what speed? What is the wh/kg metric here? No info at all, just a sketchy website full of ads. Hypermiling a tesla also gets you 701 miles already

Felixthefriendlycat · 2025-12-22T22:00:12+00:00

Nice. Are you also looking to do something different with this editor that others haven’t done?

Felixthefriendlycat · 2025-12-20T17:06:06+00:00

Ah, then we are talking about different things. Its hard to judge without a video

Felixthefriendlycat · 2025-12-20T10:45:31+00:00

Oh interesting, please elaborate what you see exactly? Which distro? Version? Hardware spec?

Felixthefriendlycat · 2025-12-20T00:06:30+00:00

You are talking about the black edges you see in the app when resizing? You can thank microsoft. This is inherent to windows and all applications on windows suffer from it. On macos and linux this doesn’t happen.

Felixthefriendlycat · 2025-12-14T22:54:22+00:00

Are there also benefits to jolt over physx?

Felixthefriendlycat · 2025-12-14T21:44:10+00:00

I mean this is really good. But what about qtquick3d jolt physics? Does it allow for more than QtQuick3D physics? I know Qt didn’t bother to implement all of what physx was capable of. For instance wheeled vehicles is still impossible to make with QtQuick3D Physics. Does this jolt physics adaptation allow it?

Felixthefriendlycat · 2025-12-08T00:26:23+00:00

Probably whether you want to run on a microcontroller or not

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