Making a launcher for the game

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    • Making a launcher for the game

      Hello, I'm trying to make a patch/update launcher for my game. I've taken inspiration from launchers like eve online, battle net, war thunder and am trying to make my own.
      I've given it a fair bit of thought and came up with the idea of using torrents with dht for distribution. Of course, there's always an option of turning it off.
      So let's split it into 3 topics.

      The technical part.
      I'm using libtorrents as the c++ torrent library to implement the torrenting part, it has hashing and file checking already implemented, it's written to be quite efficient on cpu. However the downside is with the file checking/hashing. From what i've read, blizzard had quite a few problems aligning data to efficiently patch the contents, without having to discard huge chunks of data and having enormous downloads for minimal changes.
      As for the standalone version, i was thinking of using something like rsync, to enable delta patching (librsync or something similiar). I've tested the libraries around and i got a fully functioning torrent patcher client and server running.

      The design implementation part
      I've used depends on multiple launchers, and almost all of them use qt with web plugins.
      So i've done some research and it turns out that qt and wpf are the two most commonly used tools. It also turns out that wpf (C#) is dying, which is a shame since i don't really need the speed of c++ for the launcher and i could easily call c++ libraries.
      So, i've fiddled with qt for a bit and it turns out it's a mess to work with. First of all, i'm using the visual studio qt plugin, and i'm not sure if that's the best idea. Second, it looks archaic. I've done quite a bit of gui design in unity, and i really like the anchoring and how those functionalities are used. Not really sure if the actual qt ide has those. So perhaps the third option would be to actually use cef or something similiar on opengl and just use html with css to render the entire launcher (probably a bad idea).
      So yeah, the only viable option as it seems, is to take time and get the qt visual studio plugin figured out.

      The actual design.
      I've mostly copied the battle net design, but i don't really know about a few things. How are the actual animated loading bars made? How is the frosted glass overlay made, it's not just blur is it. Is there any kind of gotcha, like don't stretch the image, have it in a huge size and have it pan out when the user stretches the interface. There's a lot of similarities between all of those lauchers, left side panel has games or some kind of square blocks, top usually has a small bar showing the name and some kind of an artistic effect. The middle is usually a web frame with news, and the bottom is launch / loading bar. Any kind of ideas or references would be appreciated.

      So right now, my problem is what gui software to use, the qt in visual studio is horrible. I'd also be grateful of any other suggestions or comments.