[Kde-games-devel] KGoldrunner

[Luciano Montanaro]

Hi all, 
some of you already know that I've been doing some work on KGoldrunner, and 
I'd like to let you know how things are progressing.

The visible changes so far are:
- The hero graphics for the default level have been tweaked to look a bit 
  more natural.
- It is now possible to have different backgrounds in each theme; the 
  game will rotate between the available background when changing level.
- There are now fadein and fadeout effects on level change.
- The Full Screen standard action is now supported by KGoldrunner.

Things I'd like to have in KDE 4.0
- Change the theme format.
- Sound support.
- Cleanup the GUI.

However, I'm leaving for a two week trip next sunday, so I'll not be able to 
work on KGoldrunner until the 6 of august. So sound support will probably 
be shifted to 4.1, but I think at least the theme format change should 
happen now, so that it will not need to change again in KDE 4.1

Things I'd like to do with regard with theming is:

- I'd like themes to include sound effects, so having themes in the 
  picts directory looks a bit weird.
- 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.
- I'd like themes to be downloadable with the hot new stuff mechanism.

With this in mind, I'd like to have themes moved from picts to theme, and 
have theme elements grouped in a subdirectory. The layout should be 
something like:

share/apps/kgoldrunner/themes/default.desktop
share/apps/kgoldrunner/themes/default/hero.svg
share/apps/kgoldrunner/themes/default/enemy.svg
share/apps/kgoldrunner/themes/default/building-blocks.svg
share/apps/kgoldrunner/themes/default/dig.ogg
share/apps/kgoldrunner/themes/default/level-completed.ogg
...
and so on.

the .desktop file would have to have references to the files in the 
subdirectory, and it should have an "Inherit" entry stating which other 
theme it is based on.

The inerithing mechanism, knewstuff and sound support may wait for next 
version, but I feel not having the layout changed now could be problematic,   
if we expect people to create their own themes.

Luciano