One of the features of VR-Forces Lua scripting that makes it so easy to create useful tasks and sets is automatic generation of dialog boxes. This feature makes it so easy to create dialog boxes that our developers often use it to create the dialog boxes for new C++ tasks, instead of using the Qt API. (VT MAK uses Qt, a cross-platform API to create the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for its products.) Unfortunately, other than providing some support for indenting, the automatically generated dialog boxes are very generic in their layout. Prior to VR-Forces 4.6, if you wanted a dialog box that supported the user with a UI design that was more than utilitarian, you were out of luck. However, in VR-Forces 4.6 we added the ability to use Qt Designer to create custom dialog boxes for Lua scripted tasks and sets.
Here is an example of how you could use Qt Designer to improve the layout of a dialog box.
Suppose that you have created a new task that has some option buttons, a couple of checkboxes and some data input fields. We also put a separator between the option buttons and the checkboxes. The default dialog box that gets created looks like Figure 1.
Figure 1:
This is a perfectly functional dialog box, but is not aesthetically pleasing. We would like some more space above and below the separator line and we want the heading and altitude fields to be in a group box, as in Figure 2.
Figure 2:
We can do this if we edit the layout using Qt Designer, as follows:
Figure 3:
This is just a trivial example, but you now have the full power of Qt Designer to lay out dialog boxes for your new scripted tasks and sets. For complete information about using Qt Designer, please see the Qt documentation.
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