[Kde-games-devel] Graphics (was Re: Survey results and IRC meeting)

[Mauricio Piacentini]

Hi, Johann! Thanks for answering the call for artists!

> Some personal answer:
> - Desktop games  are not like commercial game. Theses one have there own 
> universe, played several hours at time, in fullscreen, and try to get 
> the user forget the real life. Desktop  game are in  a windows,  played  
> (several time) 1 to 15 minutes... and i  think they  must  keep  
> graphical  harmony  with the desktop.

In general, yes. But there are other factors. Not all users will use 
Oxygen, I believe. Some might prefer a high-contrast, simpler theme. And 
there is the accessibility requirements as well. I will discuss it below.

> - KDEgames (tell me if i'm wrong) must be played even without openGL 
> support.

Yes.

<snippet removed>
> And i can tell you that sometime, on Oxygen work, we are still making 
> mistake (less with the time), and some icons are still going to the 
> trash. But we are continuing using oxygen palette, because it prevent us 
> to make more ;)

I agree with you, reusing the Oxygen look and palettes is a nice 
guideline. But I do not think it is an absolute requirement, because it 
might not be appropriate for some games, like KAsteroids, for example.

I think that what we really need is the ability to change the game 
appearance easily, and this is something we are already aiming for with 
  the adoption of SVG formats for some games. Actually we can do this 
with pngs as well, it is just that SVG lets us scale easily without loss 
in quality, as you know. So in theory we could have one theme that 
follows Oxygen more strictly (maybe contributed by Oxygen artists?), and 
other themes that might be more suited for other needs (like a black and 
white theme for accessibility that could be colored using the preferred 
foreground and background KColors.) In any event, a clear separation of 
artwork from logic is needed so we can give artists a better way to 
theme the games, in my opinion. Luckily, most games already have this in 
place, and we are slowly adding this ability to the other ones. Ideally, 
one could make an Oxygen-artset for KGoldrunner for example, and the 
user would be able to choose it in the same way it currently supports 
changing the color scheme.

Code-wise this is not that difficult to do, the problem is to find more 
people willing to help with the art. I think this will happen naturally 
(is already happening!) if we provide the hooks for easy customization, 
so that artists do not need to recompile anything, only change some SVG 
and maybe XML files to theme a game and preview the results instantly.

Regards,
Mauricio