[Qgis-developer] Discussion: could Ice be used in Qgis ?

[Hugo Mercier]

On 22/07/2015 21:26, Tim Sutton wrote:
> Hi
> 
>> On 22 Jul 2015, at 14:52, Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it
>> <mailto:cavallini at faunalia.it>> wrote:
>>
>> Il 22/07/2015 11:48, Julien Michel ha scritto:
>>> Hi Qgis developers,
>>>
>>> I wrote a small library called Ice which is able to render raster (and
>>
>> Hi all,
>> I have seen ti in action during the recent FOSS4G, and I have been
>> really impressed by its speed and capabilities. I think it would be a
>> grat addition to QGIS, as either a main or alternative renderer.
> 
> As nice as the idea is, I think it will be quite a massive undertaking
> and we would break all the beautiful (ok and ugly) cartography that
> people have come up with using the rich array of rendering styles that
> QGIS currently has.  I would also like to see a native OpenGL renderer
> one day so that we can start to thing about native 3D support. Maybe it
> would be nice to make a patch that lets you swap between Qt rendering
> backend and Ice, but honestly its probably a lot of work and may just
> fade away like the old mapnick renderer did…
> 

I agree.
To go toward OpenGL and then 3D support, we may start by finding a way
to send 2D draw primitives to an OpenGL context. This way we would have
all the current QGIS symbology support and it will be transparent for
the end user.
I may be wrong, but I think it will cost less than trying to integrate
another library (like Ice).