[Kde-games-devel] KMines SVG

[Ian Wadham]

On Sat, 10 Feb 2007 08:32 am, Mark A. Taff wrote:
> On Friday 09 February 2007 11:36:22 Mauricio Piacentini wrote:
> > A complementary question: do we really want to expose this level of
> > customization in the configuration options? Does anyone actually
> > configure the color types for each numeral in the current KMines? Or
> > simply having the option to switch themes is enough, as we can include
> > one for accessibility, another with a classic look, etc. ?
>
> Since it will all be svg (and perhaps some CSS), I'm not sure if there is
> much value in exposing that level of configurability in the gui,
> expescially if we provide, a "classic", "oxygen", and "hi-contrast" themes.
>  If we give people good base themes to start hacking from, the kde-look
> crowd will be able to innovate new themes that are required/desired.  This
> implies potentially adding KGetNewStuff to KMines in the future, if
> themeing KMines becomes popular.
>
Speaking as a player (end-user) I agree that good themes and good
defaults, including the cleaner looking "classic" theme in KMines, are
significantly more important than having lots of (possibly confusing)
configuration choices.  Only in games where the defaults were bad
have I felt a real need to re-configure, such as if the default gave you
black foreground on dark red and dark blue backgrounds, making the
foreground rather hard to see.

But none of that is going to happen in KDE Games 4, is it?  The new
classic theme in KMines makes it easy to read the position and make
moves - and that is what counts.  It's a ripper, mate!  KMines is not so
easy to use in KDE 3, so I rarely play it there.  In Windows I play it a lot,
but then there are not so many other choices of games in Windows ... ;-)

That said, and putting my programmer's hat back on, SVG/Inkscape does
seem to "hard wire" colours (as hex constants in XML and as embeddings
in drawn objects).  Perhaps it would be nice if the format had a section for
colours named by the artist (e.g. FlagColor), as well as named elements.

Some games might be able to benefit by using colour changes to generate
variations on themes, provide an aid to play or execute interesting scene
changes.  So, if there could be a simple solution to manipulating colours
in an SVG-based scene, it  must be worth searching for ...

BTW, I found the following gem in Qt's documentation of class QColor::
setNamedColor(): http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/types.html#ColorKeywords
Apparently these are standard SVG names for colours and you can use
them, with a bit of juggling, in Qt4 code, and there is a SVG type called
"color".  But I expect you guys knew this.  CSS2 is mentioned further up
the same page.

All the best, Ian W.