[kde-edu]: Custom Turtle / Re: Kturtle

[RalfGesellensetter]

On Mittwoch 27 Mai 2009 23:11:26 Niels Slot wrote:
> I can imagine that this isn't the most convient way to change the sprite.
> Implementing a 'changesprite' command wouldn't be very difficult. If there
> is demand for such a feature, I might consider putting it into KTurtle.

Hi Niels, and thanks for clarifying!

Let's discuss what is more useful:
- letting users fiddle around with local versions of a turtle (or robot or
  hedgehog or whatsoever)
- providing a theme/skin feature that allows to chose out from 3-4 sensible
  themes (as done in khangman or ktuberling). Those themes could be extended
  (or not). 

At the moment I'd slightly prefer the second option (which is of course harder 
to implement and) which needs some concept of sensible themes - for instance:

1. turtle as is
2. hedgehog (as common in German)
3. pen (reminding to a plotter)
4. car or robot or caterpillar?

Until we can settle on sensitive themes/skins (that involve the appearanve of 
buttons etc.), back to option one:

Here we had to choose out of three modes:

A. Provide a set of N sprites (svg files) to chose from (settings)
B. Add a file chooser to the settings dialoge so users can use custom icons.
C. Define commands like "setsprite file.svg"?

I don't know, if rendering is done on the fly, or once at startup, and how the 
turning (by degrees) is rendered; but SVGs could get too complex to render on 
the fly. Hence, if SVGs are to be used, we need probably some caching or 
limitations to the file complexity.

Just some floating thoughts,
regards
Ralf