[Kde-games-devel] Tileset format for KMahjongg

[Mauricio Piacentini]

Henrique Pinto wrote:
  > Have you thought of using .desktop files instead of XML? KDE has 
already a
> large infrastructure for i18n of .desktop files.

Hi, Henrique! Not really, I thought that .desktop files were for icons 
and menus only. How could we adapt or use them (or the same 
infrastructure) for game levels and artwork? Maybe this is a nice 
solution indeed, I am just ignorant on how they work exactly... Is there 
some description somewhere of the infrastructure in place for handling them?

I think this abstraction of level/artwork data is a real need now, since 
we are going to offer themability  with SVG skins. It should be possible 
to localize the theme somehow, and the only way I can see it working 
nicely is with an intermediary description, some sort of XML or similar 
file that is read by the game, and includes localized information. This 
approach is also better imo compared with direct loading all information 
from the SVG or level file, as parsing multiple SVGs is going to be much 
slower and use much more memory (think of perhaps trying to extract 
information about 10 tilesets to assemble a dialog box.)

This issue is already present in KDE3, including old bug reports like

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129469

Do you think using .desktop files could address this? I am thinking on 
having a standard way to handle localization of level and artwork data, 
and we can maybe include functions in libkdegame to centralize this 
handling, so all kdegames could benefit from it.

Regards,
Mauricio Piacentini