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

[Dmitry Suzdalev]

On Wednesday 12 July 2006 01:04, Kleag wrote:
> Hello,
>
> This message to kde-games-delvel :-) to signal that I also use
> libkdegames/KGame for KsirK (see my signature) and that it was, thanks to
> it, very easy to change KsirK into a fully network enabled game (while
> maintaining the possibility of local games).
> I also uses a lot the message passing API by implementing a kind of
> automaton that handles messages received from other clients depending of
> the current state of the game. Maybe this automaton class could be
> generalized to be used by other games.

So it seems that majority of games make a big use of KGame network features, 
and only (one that I know) kwin4 uses that KGameIO concept. Which seems to be 
useful, but renders to be unusable in QGraphicsView case :).

<sidenote>
Yesterday Martin suggested a workaround around this limitation (to emulate 
KGame*IO signals by emitting them from QGraphicsView).
It sounded like a good thing (=good hack), but when I looked at the code today 
I found that 
I miss some data that is needed for signal, because it (the data) belongs to 
another class and there's no way to get it w/o redesigning those classes... 
So I'm stuck again :).
</sidenote>

>
> I must confess that I feel that the level of maintenance of
> libkdegames/kgame is somewhat low (I don't criticize, I could help too!)
> and that there is very few up to date documentation. In fact, without the
> mykgame-1.0 example by Martin Heni I would not have been able to finish the
> port. And also, I had very helpful answers from this list each time I
> asked.
Today is a great day! I understood how passing game moves through QDataStreams 
in KGame's signals/slots work :).
Can't say that I feel this is a good way, though. Or it needs to be _well_ 
documented :). But even in that case I'd rather implement something that is 
more easier to understand.
Ok, maybe that's me who is stupid :). And lazy.

> Finally, note that there was the beginning of a very similar thread just
> one year ago: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-games-devel&m=111887101226235&w=2
Hmm interesting enough :). Same questions...

Well, how do you think, what can be done aside discussing again and again?
New cool game library?
Improved current code? (to make it cool :) )
Anything else?

Cheers, Dmitry.

PS. Sorry if my English is not quite understandable in come phrases. I do my 
best :).