[Kde-games-devel] Kolf Graphics Question

[Paul Broadbent]

I'm replying to a private email Ian sent me:

> Hi Paul,
>
> Apologies for writing to you personally, but "the mail must go
> through"!  I've already had three goes at posting this to the KDE
> Games list ...  Pity.  I wanted our art experts to have a look at my
> color ideas, but please let me know what you think (see below).
>
> > Paul Broadbent wrote:
> > Wow, I really would have quite a lot to learn to port to OpenGL, I'd also
> > need to re-write not only the graphics, but the ball movement and I'd
> > need to radically change how courses are saved. So not something I
> > can really consider at the moment, I'd like to get this finished for
> > KDE 4 rather than KDE 5 :)
>
> That was not a serious suggestion I made :-)

Hehe, thats what I'd guessed. However, Josel offered to help:
> If OpenGL graphics is your problem, maybe I could help you. I have wrote a
> OpenGL-engine some time ago and should be able to do this. However we have
> currently a not so small TODO-list at ksudoku. But I would have time to
> work on this in about one month (At least I hope so).

Thanks for the offer, but I'm a bit skeptical about opengl for Kolf at the 
moment. Although I do intend to learn openGL at some point it would be a HUGE 
amount of work to port kolf (I recon over half the code would need 
replacing), and would do nasty things like breaking compatibility with kolf 
courses. 
Also, I don't know if it could easily achieve the look I'm shooting for. I 
wan't something that looks like Katomic and the other SVG'ed games do, and I 
havn't seen much openGL stuff that looks like that.

>
> > > Have a look at the diagrams of golf holes they show on TV
> > > broadcasts of golf tournaments.  They seem to look OK, but
> > > maybe what looks good in one environment (TV) might not
> > > look so good in another (KDE desktop).
> >
> > I've googled around a bit but couldn't find any such diagrams,
> > and there doesn't seem to be much golf on TV at the moment.
> > Could you send me a pic to show me what you mean?
>
> Well I googled around a bit too: local golf club websites,
> golf course architects, etc. and I'm sorry to say that the state of
> the art in golf course diagrams is not much better than in Kolf.
> Check this out:
>
> http://www.royalmelbournegc.com/home/courses/westtour/West07.aspx
>
> Royal Melbourne is the top course in Australia and said to
> be in the top 10 in the world.  I would have expected them to
> have better graphics. :-)
Yeah, I agree. These little course pictures don't look very special at all, 
and scaled up to the size of a full Kolf game would really look quite dull.:(
>
> Attached are two ham-fisted attempts at some colorings I had
> in mind, but I just can't get my head around the Gimp and Inkscape,
> so please excuse the crudity of the artwork.  "kolf_oxy2.png" uses
> colors from the right-hand columns of the Oxygen pallette, but I
> cannot say I like them much in this context.  "kolf.svg" uses my
> own color selection and I'm not completely happy with that
> either ;-(  However, they give you an idea of what I meant by
> paler, "mapping" colors.  Note the use of faint outlines to
> separate areas of pale color and make boundaries clear.
>
> All the best, Ian W.

Thanks for the ideas Ian, I've had a quick spin with these colour schemes in 
Kolf and here are the results:
(This is only meant to be a very quick vague test of these colours. The 
already ugly slopes look FAR worse with these colours, they could probably be 
drastically improved, so don't judge these ideas based on the slopes. Also 
the original uses textures where the new ones just use plain colours so this 
really isn't very fair. However, hopefully it should give some idea what 
Ian's colours would look like)

Ian's Oxygen based colours: 
http://img453.imageshack.us/my.php?image=kolfianoxyam3.png
Ian's own colours idea:
http://img399.imageshack.us/my.php?image=kolfianmn6.png
The origonal Kolf:
http://img399.imageshack.us/my.php?image=kolforigionalaf9.png

I think Ian's Oxygen Colour based idea has potential, but the grass doesn't 
really look very appealing to me. Also it does not really solve the central 
problem, that kolf's graphics look very dated, and (even with these new 
colours), don't look very much like the new snazzy SVG based games.

I had a play around a few days ago with Katomic's background and gimp in order 
to get a more "glassy" look for Kolf, this is what I came up with:
(note: these are made completely with the gimp, I have no idea how I would 
even do this in Kolf.)
http://img230.imageshack.us/my.php?image=kolf1oz4.png
http://img48.imageshack.us/my.php?image=kolf2bw9.png

The big problem with this idea is that the different shading in the background 
will conflict with how the slopes are shown, since it makes it look like flat 
areas are actually bumpy. So this idea is pretty much useless (I'm just 
posting it to give you a very vague idea what I was thinking).

So really, I'm back at square one. Changing around the colours will help, but 
I want a bit more than that. I'm sure there must be a way to make Kolf look 
at home alongside Katomic and co, I just have no idea what that look would 
be. So if you have any ideas at all then I'd be interested to hear them.


Oh, by the way, I'm nearly ready to commit some code, having got rid of almost 
all the Q3 compatibility dependencies and fixed most of the resulting bugs. 
Just need to tidy a few bits and pieces and get my SVN account.

Paul Broadbent