[Kde-games-devel] KDE/kdegames/kgoldrunner

[Mauricio Piacentini]

Ian Wadham wrote:

> Short-term, what you have done looks very neat and clean, Mauricio,
> and is a vast improvement on my "kludge" of borrowing some blasted
> brick images from the old graphics.  What do artists think?  Do we need
> brick-blaster code?  Or is it easy enough to draw 9 more variants of the
> basic brick in each theme?  The code would not be a huge job.

I think letting the artist draw the variations opens up opportunities 
for different solutions, tied to the theme. Maybe someone writes an 
underwater-type theme, and in this case the bricks could disappear as 
little bubbles, or any other crazy idea like that. In the case of the 
"computer world" theme Johann was imagining we could have the bricks 
disappearing with a static blast, and materializing again after the time 
elapses.

What I think we can focus on is maybe allow more types of bricks and 
concretes to be used for the playfield, so the artist will provide maybe 
5 variations of bricks and 5 concretes, and there will be an algorithm 
in the code that combines these when assembling the level, depending on 
the proximity of stairs and other elements. This is relatively easy to 
implement for the artist, at least compared with the 108 frames 
necessary for the runners! And it would instantly provide a richer 
playfield, visually. I know we talked about this briefly before, just 
something to keep in mind.
Another item is maybe a "dead" position or animated sequence for the 
runner. Sometimes the enemies catch him in midair, or the runner runs 
down in a hole occupied by the enemy. At this time the runner only 
freezes in place when it dies, so the player sometimes takes a while to 
understand what happened. If we switched to a "dead" animation frame the 
feedback would be more immediate.

> The ladder and bar were provided by Johann.  Maybe he will need them
> again.  The rest was data I used for testing and will not be missed.

I used a different name for the .svg, and in any case the older test 
theme can be rescued from SVN. I still have it around if necessary.

> Some day, if we are going to stick with brick-like and concrete-like
> objects, I'd like to see some more natural-looking colours and textures.
> Is it possible to do surface textures in SVG (i.e. as in OpenGL)?

At this time the QSVGRenderer does not understand placed pixmaps, but 
people are doing pretty amazing photo-realistic stuff with vector 
nowadays. At the small resolution required for KGoldrunner elements I 
think it is possible to produce very realistic-looking effects.

>>
> You've earned it, Mauricio.  Have a really good Easter !  And thank
> you again and again for all your work on KGoldrunner.

Thank you for maintaining the game alive, bug fixes and hundreds of levels.

Regards,
Mauricio