[Kde-games-devel] KGoldrunner

[Mauricio Piacentini]

Parker Coates wrote:
> On 7/20/07, Luciano Montanaro <mikelima at gmail.com> wrote:
>> - I'd like to split hero and enemy frames out of the main svg file; many
>>   themes could use the same animation graphics, which are the hardest
>>   part to draw.
>> - I'd like to have themes inherit from other themes.
>>
> 
> Hello Luciano,
> 
> I'd like to urge you to rethink the above proposal to separate
> graphics across multiple files and to implement theme inheritance. The
> way I see it, it is over complicating the situation without any great
> benefits.
...

Parker makes some valid observations. I can see that there are 
advantages in having every theme completely self contained, using a 
single SVG file. As an example, I may decide to change something in one 
of my themes. If another theme depends on it this may break the other 
theme, or at least make it not as good as the original author intended.
On the other hand, I agree that most people will mostly copy the 
original runner graphics, because I can definitely tell you that they 
are not easy to create and adjust :)
So it is a difficult decision... maybe you could split the runner 
graphics from other theme elements, but encourage theme authors to 
include their own copy of the default_runner.svg in their own theme 
subdirectory, so that changes upstream would not break their themes. The 
  user would also have a quick way to experiment/update just the 
runners, if necessary. The overhead of having 2 or 3 SVGRenderers for 
this particular case is probably not even measurable, as it would be 
offset by the smaller size and parsing time for each file.
Another plus for Luciano's proposal is that copying and pasting in 
Inkscape is not really bug free across documents, and it fails for 
example if elements have the same names/ids, which is very common. This 
might be solved in future versions of Inkscape, but right now just 
copying and pasting from the default SVG to your own SVG or merging SVG 
themes is not as easy as it sounds, depending on what you already have 
on your document. This can be very discouraging to new theme authors, 
and in this case the proposal of having separate graphics for runners 
(copied from the default theme) definately makes things easier for 
beginners.

Regards,
Mauricio Piacentini