So I'll create a GitHub project for this new Universal MR Client, and assuming we move forward with Qt as the framework of choice, who would like to be added as contributors on the project?

Who would like to take a stab at creating the project in code and getting things ready to begin development?

Great feedback, thanks guys!

In terms of updating, we do need to support pushing out mandatory updates for clients as the server might change things in a way that breaks support for older clients or in rarer cases there might be a critical client bug affecting save files for other players that we'd want to patch.

I think it would be alright to use a different updating mechanism for each platform, perhaps even supporting multiple mechanisms for Linux if necessary. I imagine we could script the release processes into a continuous integration server without too much effort, and in the app we could have seperate self-updating implementations that get used based on the detected host OS.

Thanks for the feedback guys! I think I'm leaning towards using Qt for the universal MR Client.

Can anyone tell us what deployment and update options there are for it? Android and iOS are pretty well defined, but are there any tools or frameworks that could allow us to easily deploy and auto-update the client across Mac, Linux, and Windows?

I believe we've fixed the issue with Games loading now. And Oracle is almost complete, just finishing up BE support. Hopefully will release next month :)

You can also try starting your game in a later era (such as Classical). This will start you each out with a couple settlers and several units. It makes the first month of turns much more interesting.

Originally posted by dconman2:

Hello,

QT sounds like a good choice. Whatever you go with, a cross-platform system is ideal, or at least the core code should be the same across implementations. I would be willing to help out, I have worked mostly with C++ and Java, but can work with anything if needed. Keep me posted, I'm subscribing to this discussion!

Dawson

Excellent, good to have you!

Originally posted by Silasary:

If we want to keep in in C#, I'd recommend using Mono.XWT, a framework that abstracts and uses WPF, Cocoa, and GTK to allow a singular codebase to look native on Windows, OSX and Linux.

Thanks, this looks promising!

Thanks Andruh! We have open sourced the new Windows client on GitHub here: https://github.com/n7software/MRobot.Windows

You can see the SignalR and API methods we use in the source for it. We hoped it would be a good starting place for developing a cross-platform client.

@bleissem: That's awesome! I had no idea you were working on a Linux client. Is it fully functional? We're not planning on open sourcing the server at this time.

Sorry for the trouble! If you login to the GMR website and click on your avatar in the top-right corner you'll see a control panel drop down that (among other settings) allows you to set an In-Game password. Try setting it to some value "abc", saving, and then deleting it and saving again. After all this try re-downloading the save for your game and see if it works.

It doesn't really matter anymore what you have as your In-Game password since we now set your player to have a random "un-typeable" password when other players download the save file. In the upcoming MR 2.0 we've actually done away with the concept.

So reviewing the LGPL license for Qt I believe it would work just fine for what we're doing. I've also done some research into the libraries available and I believe it could easily support all of the key features I feel the desktop app needs to have, including:

• SignalR Client
  
• Filesystem Monitoring
  
• System Task Tray Icon
  
• Toast Notifications

I think Qt is a strong option for developing a cross-platform desktop client for the new MR, even replacing what we've already done for Windows. Before we take off in that direction though are there any other libraries or frameworks we could consider that would also work?