idea for the future: built-in console

[illwieckz]

I truely believe the updater's vocation is to become the Unvanquished launcher, while the Dæmon engine would be an updatable component like cgame or a map.

I would like to be able to tick a checkbox in that launcher and get the game started with a console, a bit like classic FPS did.

Maybe Qt has a ready-to-use console component we can leverage ?

In that schema, even Linux distributions would be able to ship the launcher, we would still announce news to players even if a distro throws away the update code at build time.

[illwieckz]

The checkbox may be placed in main ui right to the proposed checkbox to automatically start the game once downloaded, see #48.

[DolceTriade]

I think you would have to specify what console. Also, I'm not sure how this would work in a cross platform way. OSX you would force terminal, windows terminal, and on linux use $TERMINAL?

[illwieckz]

I'm not thinking about some random console already found in the wild.
I'm hoping for builtin terminal widget. Does Qt have such things or is it KDE only?

[illwieckz]

Maybe https://github.com/lxqt/qtermwidget ?

[slipher]

I don't get it

[illwieckz]

The idea is that the launcher would stay in background displaying the game console.

I always start unvanquished from a terminal because I find more natural to alt-tab and because it allows copy-pasting and such like that. One day I tried to add Unvanquished to lutris and the first thing I did was to enable to option to start the game with a console. I can't think about starting unvanquished without a real terminal (I feel the in-game console to be just enough to type devmap and things like that), that's the reason I don't use the updater myself, which is bad (eating your own dog food blablabla). :D

[illwieckz]

in the past some games did this (random screenshot found on the internetz):

[slipher]

Keep in mind there is already the -curses option to launch an external console.

[illwieckz]

On which OS that option launches an external console, on Windows?

[slipher]

Right, it's only on Windows. But maybe it's of interest.

[slipher]

Updater users who want to have a terminal created for Unvanquished may achieve this by setting a custom command in the updater settings. For example, gnome-terminal -- %command%. See https://askubuntu.com/a/46630 for various ways to start a Linux terminal with a command running in it.

[DolceTriade]

Rather than a terminal, it would be better about saving logfiles and such. The console is mainly useful for developers and developers should be able to find ways to make this work for them.