updater
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Unvanquished
idea for the future: built-in console
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.
The checkbox may be placed in main ui right to the proposed checkbox to automatically start the game once downloaded, see #48.
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?
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?
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
in the past some games did this (random screenshot found on the internetz):
Keep in mind there is already the -curses option to launch an external console.
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.
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.