Book Image

Game Programming Using Qt: Beginner's Guide

By : Witold Wysota, Witold Wysota, Lorenz Haas
Book Image

Game Programming Using Qt: Beginner's Guide

By: Witold Wysota, Witold Wysota, Lorenz Haas

Overview of this book

Qt is the leading cross-platform toolkit for all significant desktop, mobile, and embedded platforms and is becoming more popular by the day, especially on mobile and embedded devices. Despite its simplicity, it's a powerful tool that perfectly fits game developers’ needs. Using Qt and Qt Quick, it is easy to build fun games or shiny user interfaces. You only need to create your game once and deploy it on all major platforms like iOS, Android, and WinRT without changing a single source file. The book begins with a brief introduction to creating an application and preparing a working environment for both desktop and mobile platforms. It then dives deeper into the basics of creating graphical interfaces and Qt core concepts of data processing and display before you try creating a game. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll learn to enrich your games by implementing network connectivity and employing scripting. We then delve into Qt Quick, OpenGL, and various other tools to add game logic, design animation, add game physics, and build astonishing UI for the games. Towards the final chapters, you’ll learn to exploit mobile device features such as accelerators and sensors to build engaging user experiences. If you are planning to learn about Qt and its associated toolsets to build apps and games, this book is a must have.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Game Programming Using Qt
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Choosing the right license


Qt is available under two different licensing schemes—you can choose between a commercial license and an open source one. We will discuss both here to make it easier for you to choose. If you have any doubts regarding whether a particular licensing scheme applies to your use case, better consult a professional lawyer.

An open source license

The advantage of open source licenses is that we don't have to pay anyone to use Qt; however, the downside is that there are some limitations imposed on how it can be used.

When choosing the open source edition, we have to decide between GPL 3.0 and LGPL 2.1 or 3. Since LGPL is more liberal, in this chapter we will focus on it. Choosing LGPL allows you to use Qt to implement systems that are either open source or closed source—you don't have to reveal the sources of your application to anyone if you don't want to.

However, there are a number of restrictions you need to be aware of:

  • Any modifications that you make to Qt itself need to be made public, for example, by distributing source code patches alongside your application binary.

  • LGPL requires that users of your application must be able to replace Qt libraries that you provide them with other libraries with the same functionality (for example, a different version of Qt). This usually means that you have to dynamically link your application against Qt so that the user can simply replace Qt libraries with his own. You should be aware that such substitutions can decrease the security of your system, thus, if you need it to be very secure, open source might not be the option for you.

  • LGPL is incompatible with a number of licenses, especially proprietary ones, so it is possible that you won't be able to use Qt with some commercial components.

The open source edition of Qt can be downloaded directly from http://www.qt.io.

A commercial license

All these restrictions are lifted if you decide to buy a commercial license for Qt. This allows you to keep the entire source code a secret, including any changes you may want to incorporate in Qt. You can freely link your application statically against Qt, which means fewer dependencies, a smaller deployment bundle size, and a faster startup. It also increases the security of your application, as end users cannot inject their own code into the application by replacing a dynamically loaded library with their own.

Note

To buy a commercial license, go to http://qt.io/buy.