[Kde-games-devel] KGoldrunner themes

[Ian Wadham]

I'm posting this in case it affects any other games or libraries.

On Tue, 21 Aug 2007 03:27 am, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> However I just recompiled qt-copy (4.3.1) and kgoldrunner, and I have
> found a couple of problems:
>
> - I can no longer use the keyboard to play. Pressing the cursor keys does
> no good, and using the menu to chose the keyboard mode simply disable the
> mouse mode, and the hero remains standing still.
>
> - There is a sort of grid over the playing area; this is not visible with
> the Egypt theme because its tile have some spacing already, but on all
> other themes I can see semitransparent vertical lines between the tiles.
>
On Fri, 24 Aug 2007 05:32 pm, Luciano wrote to Ian W. (off list):
> The keyboard shortcuts not working were due to a change in kdelibs, I
> think. I'll ask on kde-core-devel.
> Basically, the shortcuts with an alternative key did not work because the
> parsing code wanted "; " as a separator, and there was a single ";" in the
> rc file.
>
I think shortcuts and alternatives are mostly handled by Qt now.  It
would be nice if the syntax change were made more public or, better
still, avoided altogether.  I have had several problems with changes
to shortcuts library-code during KDE 4.0 development, mainly because
I rely so much on the Pause key (P; Esc) when testing KGoldrunner.
It's hell when it does not work ... :-(

> I worked around the border around the tile in most themes by using a
> bounding rect for the render function that is one pixel larger than the
> image to use for the rendering (it's half a pixel for each border).
> Probably this is due to some consistency change in Qt.
>
I wonder if it is related to the 0.5 pixel all-around that QGV adds/added(?)
to every pixmap size, to allow for anti-aliasing.  A side-effect was that
exactly adjacent tiles in KGr were seen to be overlapping, so QGV would
repaint nine tiles every time you picked up gold and changed one tile.  This
was not the main QGV overhead that affected KGr, however.

Maybe Trolltech moved the half-pixel trick into the QPainter in Qt 4.3.1
to save some overhead in QGV (e.g. reduce pixmaps by 0.5 pixels all
around before antialiasing and painting), but I cannot see any mention
of it in the 4.3.1.change list.  If true, it might account for Luciano's and
Mauricio's observation of cracks between the bricks in Qt 4.3.1.

The good news is that Qt 4.3.0 handles Luciano's 1-pixel expansion
very well.  The only evidence of it I can see is very-slightly uneven
spacing of the "teeth" (silver bits) in the "concrete" in Geek City.

BTW, what is the need for the hasPanelTiles attribute in the
kgrtheme.cpp changes?  It is apparently set but not used ... ;-)

All the best, Ian W.