Qt3D Will Likely Only Be A Tech Preview In Qt 5.5

While Qt3D is making great progress in recent months, for the upcoming release of Qt 5.5 it will most likely only ship as a "tech preview" feature.

KDAB has been working very hard on Qt3D after it fell apart for Qt 5.0 back in the day during Nokia's Qt shafting. The new version of the Qt3D module is nearly ready but not fully-baked, which is why Sean Harmer of KDAB proposed today that this be a "tech preview" feature of the next Qt tool-kit update.

Sean Harmer explained that the mouse input support in Qt3D is "a bit of a hack", the buffer/attribute API is still being worked out, Threadweaver is to be replaced to allow for commercial licensing, and there's some other rough edges still being looked at within the API. Harmer wrote, "As these parts of the API are not finished just yet and the feature freeze is today, I'd like to request that we ship Qt3D with Qt 5.5 having the Technology Preview status. This will also allow us to gather a round of feedback from a wider audience on the APIs we have which will be valuable before setting them in stone."

Qt3D should then be in great stable shape for Qt 5.6 due out around the end of the year. Besides Qt3D, Qt 5.5 has many new features and is going into a feature freeze next week. Details on the Qt3D status for 5.5 can be found via this mailing list thread.