Show HN: 2D Game engine and editor for Windows and Linux

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This is probably the most important thing when advertising your game engine. Tech demos (like Arkanoid) are easy to make with any engine, but actual games less so. Even modest indie game releases can include tons of assets and scripting, complex workflows and custom tooling (depending on the game and the team structure), and all kinds of platform-specific tweaks.

Developing a full-blown game often exposes the actual glaring problems of the game engine. And I think dogfooding is incredibly important in fixing these issues (developing a full game alongside with a game engine).

I chose Qt because I'm already very familiar with it and I know that it can do so much stuff out of the box and I want the editor to work as any other app as much as possible, i.e. tooltips, shortcuts, cut/copy/paste keyboard focus etc.

So everything works fine (as long as you know Qt's quirks) except that:

OpenGL support is kind of a mess. You have QOpenGLWidget, QGLWidget,QOpenGLWindow, QGLwindow which can all support OpenGL rendering. The problem is that while QOpenGLWidget works nicely with the rest of the toolkit ( context menus etc) the Performance is very suboptimal. I found it to be an magnitude of order worse than just using a window. I'm sure there's something else going other than just FBO overhead.

Another problem related to this but not unique to Qt is how to render to multiple window surfaces but to keep to a nice framerate. If you use vsync on each surface your framerate will be your display sync divided by the # of your surfaces. If you don't vsync then you're running a busy loop and burn cycles in a busy loop. I've tried many ways to do this nicely and haven't found a perfect solution yet. Would be very happy to hear some suggestions. Currently I'm just adding a little thread delay to cap the CPU use but this creates little hiccups in animation sometimes.