The Legend of Dolphin: A Lens Between Worlds

[MayImilae]

A new article has been published on the Dolphin blog - The Legend of Dolphin: A Lens Between Worlds

Feel free to discuss the article on this thread.

And yea, this is a weird one! We wanted to do something special to celebrate Qt finally FINALLY becoming Dolphin's default GUI!

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[mbc07]

And our dear blog writers surprises us again! Who could imagine an article about Dolphin switching its UI toolkit would result in a Zelda-like narrative? You guys are amazing!

Some bikeshedding:

About Qt vs Wx, posting here probably isn't best place to show that but I decided to give a try and while Qt looks exactly the same as Wx feature-wise, there's two details I felt I needed to talk about:

Firstly, is the tab background supposed to be gray (mostly noticeable in the Graphics settings) on Qt? On Wx and on virtually all other programs with similar UIs, the tab background is white, and the background of the window which is "holding" this tab is gray (left is Qt, right is Wx):
       

And secondly, while all tabs from the General Settings seems to get the background colors right (tab content has white background and window background is gray), there's no padding around the group boxes (except on the GameCube and Advanced tab -- those have proper padding and matches Wx exactly on this aspect). There's also a lot of unused space on some pages (mainly in audio page), but I think I understand that's a small price to pay to have freely resizable windows everywhere and I'm not sure if that's fixable (left is Qt, right is Wx):
       

Anyway, that's how Dolphin Qt is looking like here on Windows 10 (and for record, I'm using a high DPI screen, not sure if it's related), the lack of padding and the background colors are bugging me a bit so I had to show somewhere...

[KHg8m3r]

Lol, the great journey leading to The Haunted Bikeshed. Made my morning

[Mrnoname1000]

Why exactly was wx so limiting and inflexible? Was it poorly written to begin with or is wxWidgets just inherently hard to work with?

[AnyOldName3]

WxWidgets is notorious for being a massive pain in the arse, especially if you're modifying something that already exists. Also, it has no support at all for things like controlling the UI with a gamepad, but Qt won't make a developer do that much work to add that kind of thing.

[ExtremeDude2]

Well that was an interesting way to write and article :p

[Jack Frost]

That was a truly epic post, you guys rock! /me stands up and applauds

[flashmozzg]

Great post! Does this act as April's Progress Report or is it still coming?

[Admentus]

Another victory for Dolphin! Long Live Qt!

I am already used to the Qt interface by now. I don't see the need to go back to the WX interface anymore. The auto-updater is really amazing by the way. Being able to add Gecko Codes directly through the interface is a quality-of-life improvement... Curse you WX!

[spycrab]

And our dear blog writers surprises us again! Who could imagine an article about Dolphin switching its UI toolkit would result in a Zelda-like narrative? You guys are amazing!

Some bikeshedding:

About Qt vs Wx, posting here probably isn't best place to show that but I decided to give a try and while Qt looks exactly the same as Wx feature-wise, there's two details I felt I needed to talk about:

Firstly, is the tab background supposed to be gray (mostly noticeable in the Graphics settings) on Qt? On Wx and on virtually all other programs with similar UIs, the tab background is white, and the background of the window which is "holding" this tab is gray (left is Qt, right is Wx):


And secondly, while all tabs from the General Settings seems to get the background colors right (tab content has white background and window background is gray), there's no padding around the group boxes (except on the GameCube and Advanced tab -- those have proper padding and matches Wx exactly on this aspect). There's also a lot of unused space on some pages (mainly in audio page), but I think I understand that's a small price to pay to have freely resizable windows everywhere and I'm not sure if that's fixable (left is Qt, right is Wx):


Anyway, that's how Dolphin Qt is looking like here on Windows 10 (and for record, I'm using a high DPI screen, not sure if it's related), the lack of padding and the background colors are bugging me a bit so I had to show somewhere...

Your shed has been granted: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/pull/6739