[Kde-games-devel] KDE HIG (was Re: KGameDifficulty)

[Nicolas Roffet]

Hi Mauricio, Hi Johann, Hi Dmitry, hi everybody on the list,


Thanks first of all for the feedback and the discussion. I'll try to be shot.

(1): YES, the idea of KGameDifficulty was (and is) to provide an easy, 
uniformed and standardized solution to manage the difficulty levels over all 
KDE games. So I would NOT be very happy to make this solution too much 
customisable so that the games don't look the same anymore...

(2): If for any reason, a game don't want to (or cannot) use this standard 
solution, it's still possible to implement a special solution, for instance 
with KStandardGameAction::chooseGameType(...), or without it. It's not much 
work anyway. For some games with special needs, it's better to reimplement 
everything. (For instance: KSpaceDuel need to define a difficulty level per 
computer player and they can be more than one. It's a special case.)

(3): I'd like to see a standardized solution, but I'm opened about HOW it 
should be. If we think it's not that good in the status bar, I'll be glad to 
change this. And a change in the library would affect all the games (using 
it) and they would still look the same to each other. :)

(4): I'd like the solution to be as easy as possible to use for the game 
developper, so that he prefers to use it than to reimplement everything, 
(what would not be a lot of work anyway, as I allready wrote in (2)!). So 
it's important that the programmer don't have to do to much itself and that 
the library does the maximum.

(5): It's not a problem if the user hide the status bar or if the game don't 
have any, because there is still the menu "Settings" to select the 
difficulty.
(However, this is not standardized yet. I'd like to make a change in the 
following file, for this but I don't know who to ask, or if I should ask 
anyone else than the list:
/trunk/KDE/kdelibs/kdeui/ui_standards.rc )

(6): If we can and need in the future to put a game difficulty selector widget 
over a QGraphicsView or anything else (it could be a good idea), I'll be glad 
to extend the API for this.

(7): YES, I think it's a good idea to involve the usability team of KDE to 
help us to here. Furthermore, I'd like to have standards & guidelines as I 
already said during the last IRC meeting. We could start at the beginning 
with KDE Games guidelines. But I understood that the problem was to agree 
with each other...

(8): The idea to put the selector in the status bar was that it is already 
like this in the game "bovo", and during the aKademy, Johann and I found that 
this it was a nice idea. It's an information (current difficulty) and it's 
editable so you can also directly and easily change it. 
=> Personly, I like this better like this than in the toolbar. It's my 
opinion, but I ready to discuss about it. There may be better solutions. I'd 
like the best (well at least a good) solution for KDE games!

(9): For information: these are the games of the game module that use or could 
(or should?) use KGameDifficulty in the future:
 - Bovo
 - KBlackBox
 - KGoldrunner
 - KJumpingCube
 - KMines
 - KNetWalk
 - KReversi
 - KShisen (Shisen-Sho)
 - KSquares
 - KSudoku
 - KWin4
And there are also many games from playground that use or could use it. 
That's a lot (almost 50% of the games) and it would be nice IMO if all these 
games would behave the same, (like for instance the way we manage high 
scores: all games behave the same). That's the goal I had (and still have).

What do you think about it? As I said, I'm opened to make improvements to 
reach this goal.

Thanks!

-- 
Nicolas
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