[Kde-games-devel] KGame/KPlayer API usability in kdegames

[Andreas Beckermann]

On Monday 10 July 2006 10:55, Dmitry Suzdalev wrote:
> Hi!

Hi

> Well, here comes the next kdegames dev-newbie question :).

So why kde-devel instead of kde-games-devel?

> It's all about KGame class.
> The lxr.kde.org shows me that from 31 games only 2 (kwin4 and
> kbackgammon) are KGame-based!

So is my (local) kpoker version and so is boson (not in kde svn, though).

> Is it really needed then?
> Personally, as I try to port kwin4 to QGraphicsView I hit some
> problems with KGame.
> Major of them is that it has not-so-understandable API.
> At least I have difficulties in understanding those signals and slots
> which write event data to QDataStream...
> I'd rather port kwin4 _from_using_ KGame then the rest of games to _use_ it
> :). Well, it seems that only KReversi has "Port to KGame/KPlayer" in it's
> TODO :).
>
> So what was the purpose of developing KGame/KPlayer? Were they meant
> to be used as universal-base-classes+kernel of all kdegames?

They were meant to make network based games easier. That's pretty much the 
whole point.

> I don't think they can succeed in this role...
> What's their history? :)

Their history is, that there are a lot of things in these classes which simply 
didn't work out. For example the whole PolicyClean concept of KGameProperty, 
which I'd heavily recommend against nowadays.

On the other hand there are also lots of concepts which worked out perfectly, 
such as the KGameIO concept which makes network/AI/human players pretty much 
all the same and thus very easy :-)

So if you intend to throw KGame away, please let the relevant people (i.e. 
especially kde-games-devel) know, so we (in particular me) can use 
replacements for existing code. In particular it'd be pointless for boson to 
keep a copy of kgame, if kgame doesn't really exist anymore (atm we provide a 
copy of the kgame directory, so that boson doesn't depend on libkdegames).
And of course my 2 local games that are not in a releasable state will need 
some changes then, too. So I'd really like to get informed before kgame is 
going to /dev/null

> Thanks.
> Dmitry.

CU
Andi