[WIP] New Qt UI (pyqt6)

[Debilski]

Adding another work-in-progress PR for a different UI toolkit. This time PyQt6. Please see below for graphics.

I am undecided if we should really push this one and completely replace our old Tk design, but I have at least brought it into a workable state now. (I think the ghosts are still a little short and need a bit of a stretch.)

The advantages of Qt would be:

• Can do threading: We can receive zmq messages in a background thread and notify the app
• Much easier to do graphics: automatically scales all elements to the size that is needed
• Anti-aliasing
• Can easily export to PNG
• Does have an animation framework but I haven’t tested it yet.
• Might be easier to implement new features
• Alpha channel: Ghosts could be slightly transparent so that food shines through them

Similarly to Tk:

• I had hoped that we’d also be able to just write html+css for the text in the header and status but that doesn’t seem to be possible. So this part looks just like it used to.
• Styling of buttons is possible but they lose their native look.

Disadvantages:

• Not all features yet
• Needs more dependencies
• Not sure if it will run everywhere
• We might have to support both Qt and Tk for some time (maybe forever)
• PyQt6 and PySide are competing frameworks. In principle they might both work but this needs a small compatibility layer (mainly for imports)
• We got used to the old, rough look (and on macOS it is actually fine – see below for the faux 3d chin of Pacman)

Virtualenv Qt6

Conda Qt6 (disclaimer: I only tested the version that pip would install)

In comparison, these show the differences/problems with Tk:

Conda Tk (no anti-aliasing)

Virtualenv Tk (anti-aliasing in text but not in graphics)

macOS Tk (does anti-aliasing but look at the colour of the buttons)

Detail (Faux 3d out of nowhere – although this actually looks cool)

[Debilski]

The possibilities are endless

[codecov-commenter]

Codecov Report

Merging #756 (8eacad7) into main (aef2fe1) will decrease coverage by 0.62%.
The diff coverage is 11.53%.

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@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##             main     #756      +/-   ##
==========================================
- Coverage   85.72%   85.11%   -0.62%     
==========================================
  Files          21       21              
  Lines        2354     2378      +24     
==========================================
+ Hits         2018     2024       +6     
- Misses        336      354      +18     

Files Changed	Coverage Δ
pelita/game.py	81.91% <11.53%> (-4.59%)	⬇️

... and 1 file with indirect coverage changes

[otizonaizit]

The possibilities are endless

that's called cultural appropriation or racial and ethnic stereotype, you choose ;-)

[Debilski]

I got the idea from a tequila bottle. I’m innocent here :)