[Kde-games-devel] KSokoban: Who will revive it?

[Ian Wadham]

On Thu, 20 Dec 2007 06:36 pm, Tadeusz Andrzej Kad³ubowski wrote:
    (on the "Ressurecting a game" thread).
> Thus wrote Ian Wadham:
> > Other members of the KDE Games group have expressed an interest in
> > reviving KSokoban and KPoker in KDE 4.1 ...
>
> At some point (circa June 2007) I started porting and refactoring KSokoban.
> I had level storage working with KStandardDirs and started
> SVG+QGraphicsView, which was (IMHO) too big a refactoring.
>
At about that time (late May 2007), Dmitry Suzdalev said he wanted to
revive KSokoban for KDE 4.1 and I asked if I could join him.  Dmitry
did a lot of work on it for KDE 4, as the commit logs show, but he
became far too busy with other games, such as KAtomic.

I am happy to step aside (though I would still be interested in
progress), because I have a full list of things to do in KGoldrunner
and KJumpingCube fro KDE 4.1.

Also I have a new game to put forward and I have not had a chance
to work on it since March 2006 ...  Jeez, this KDE 4 thing has been
a long haul ... !!!!

So, are you still interested in KSokoban? ... and is Dmitry?
Let's sort this out.

> I'd rather rewrite it from scratch actually.
>
This is always a temptation.  I'd like to have a hot dinner for every time
time I have heard someone say this, in a long career spanning several
decades ... :-)->>> ... including myself saying it once or twice! ... :-( ...

In my experience, something is always lost and there is inevitably some
design decision, quirk, feature or neat way of doing things that is missed
by the new writer.  In the case of KSokoban there was a "rewrite" between
KDE 1 and KDE 2, and a whole lot of levels went missing, just as I was
starting to learn and love the game ... so I have not played it since then
... :-( ... the remaining (new?) levels are just too difficult and unrewarding
for me.

So, if anyone is going to do a re-write, please at least scrutinise the
old code thoroughly and try to understand it fully, however difficult
that may be ... and it is &@*!^% difficult in the case of KSokoban.

Cheers, Ian W.

P.S. The original levels are still tucked away in SVN if you go back far
enough.  SVN remembers everything ... ;-)

   The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
   Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit
       Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
   Nor all thy Tears wash out one Word of it.

   The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, stanza 51,
       in 19th century English by Edward Fitzgerald.