Question

I am creating a 3ds model loader using Qt.

I want to take advantage of the Qt resource system and use it for loading models and such.

I would like to do syntax similar to this:

Mesh* MeshLoader::loadMesh(const QString& resource) {
    QResource qResource(resource);
    QResource::registerResource(resource); 
    SomeBuffer buffer(qResource.data())
    while (!buffer.eof()) { 
        // Process the file
    }
    QResource::unregisterResource(resource);
}

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

And what’s the problem with the code you included in you post?

Just as a note: you can use the Qt resource notation (the leading : in the path) with pretty much every Qt data/stream reader. For example you can use QFile(“:/someresource”). With QFile and QDataStream I think (but maybe I’m wrong) you can read only chunks of the file without loading the whole resource and blocking the thread during reading. If it blocks the main-thread you can always use QRunnable or QThread to load resources in background.

For the buffering: I don’t know any caching solution built into Qt (except in the networking related parts), so you should probably implement it for yourself.

This way you can build a MyResource class which loads the target resource in a background thread and notifies with signal/slot when it’s finished and can cache the resource’s data the way you want.