[Kde-games-devel] KDE games walkthrough

[Mauricio Piacentini]

Hi, Martin. I looked at the list of games you analyzed, with an updated 
SVN checkout and updated kdelibs as well.
In your list you have several games listed that are no longer in 
kdegames: they have been moved to playground a couple of months ago. 
These are:

atlantik
kasteroids
kenolaba
kfouleggs
klickety
ksirtet
ksnake
ksokoban
ktron

Maybe you need to run a
svn cleanup

in your kdegames directory? They all compile in playground, but several 
crash at startup, while the others have some issues or have not been 
ported fully to KDE4. I think Nicolas ported kenolaba. There are some 
other games in playground that are waiting to come to the official 
module, like ksirk and kblocks.

I checked the games in the kdegames module that you mentioned were not 
compiling due to outdated kdelibs on your machine, or crashing:

kolf: Works here. Console throws a X11 Render extension errors at 
startup, maybe this is why it fails for you?

X Error: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes) 8
   Extension:    154 (RENDER)
   Minor opcode: 4 (RenderCreatePicture)
   Resource id:  0x2c00016

So probably something to look into. Following your style of comments, I 
would say

kolf:
	+graphics ok, better than KDE3
	+lots of people asked for it in the kdegames survey
	-dialog boxes are not pretty
	-bugs in the KDE3 version apparently still present (ball can go through 
walls for example)

	Almost ready, Paul can give us some feedback about his plans.

kbattleship:
	+nice graphics
	+UI completely redone
	-needs minor adjustments (set minimum window size for example)
	-configuration dialog not working for me

	Nice and ready

kbounce:
	+nice graphics
	+theme loading implemented
	+nice gameplay and feedback to the user between levels
	-maybe adjust the initial message to be friendlier? Just click on a 
button to start, like kbattleship?

	Nice and ready

ktuberling:
	+nice graphics
	+completely redone, scalable
	+wonderful new themes
	-some elements are cut (QtSvg bug)
	-very large sound sets... Are they current? Convert to .ogg?

	Nice and ready

As for the others, I agree with all of your comments :) I think we need 
to discuss the games with no maintainers, like kbackgammon, and the 
status of knetwalk and ksame. Specially with the string freeze, we need 
to play relatively safe imo, and it might be wise to move still more 
games to playground (for KDE 4.0) to give us time to concentrate on 
really getting the ones in kdegames completely right in time for this 
initial release. KMahjongg for example needs some work in the 
configuration dialog and layout selector. So even the games that we are 
considering "finished" are really at most 80-90% done, I think.

Regards,
Mauricio Piacentini