[Kde-games-devel] Re: Kpoker

[Andreas Beckermann]

On Saturday 21 August 2004 23:12, Inge Wallin wrote:
> On Sat, 21 Aug 2004, Andreas Beckermann wrote:
> > On Saturday 21 August 2004 21:16, Inge Wallin wrote:
> > > Is KPoker actively maintained?
> >
> > A definite "maybe" on this ;-)
>
> Good.  It's always nice to get a straight answer.  :-)
>
> > > Using WebCVS at webcvs.kde.org, I can't
> > > see any non-trivial fixes for over 13 months.  There are a few bugs in
> > > the bugzilla (notably bug 30272 -
> > > http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30272) that I would like to fix.
> >
> > This is because I have had a completely new version of KPoker on my disk
> > for a _very_ long time now. A rewrite from scratch that is supposed to
> > fix a lot of issues.
> > Unfortunately I can never find the time to complete that thing and
> > working on the current CVS code is a pretty hard punishment in my opinion
> > (terrible code design, coding style totally fucked up and so on)
>
> I see.  Maybe you should take a look at
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html.
>
> Among other things it says (about the long delay of the first Netscape):
>
> "They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any
> software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch."
>
> Very, very true.  :-)  I love the articles of Joel Spolsky.

Actually it is completely wrong.
IIRC netscape was written in a lot of different languages. Maintaining such a 
beast is hell on earth. In Open Source it's the end of a project.

Concerning KPoker: well, just look at the code and you know why I decided to 
do that :)
There really wasn't much code that still was usable. Not for the primary goal 
of supporting network and computer players. KPoker was written as a single 
player game and I added the computer player to it.
Well, it worked but it showed perfectly my level of experience at that 
time :-)

Most hand-test methods have to mostly rewritten for multiplayer games anyway 
(my current code does that very well, btw and I have even written some tests 
for them. I believe they work _very_ well).

> > > Also, I have just finished a complete cleanup of the code of KReversi.
> > > Would anybody object if I did the same on KPoker?  The code looks a
> > > bit... interesting... in some places.
> >
> > Since I don't know if I ever get to finish my rewrite I guess I cannot
> > object against someone who is actually willing to do something :)
>
> I am right on it then.

If you want to I can send you my current development code.
It is mostly working already, the design is complete so far and games up to 4 
players should be working.
It's "just" the GUI feedback and things like that that has to be written. 
Unfortunately that's a lot of work :-(
Oh and I cannot send it to you right now, cause it is on a different computer 
(one I don't have access to atm). If you are interested, please tell me, I 
will make sure that I get it in a week or so.

>  -Inge

CU
Andi