[Kde-games-devel] kbattleship and welcome screen

[Paolo Capriotti]

After a number of failed attempts and experiment, I'm starting to be a bit 
dubious about the whole 'welcome screen' thing [1] [2]. 
The idea is good, in principle: after the game has started, the user should be 
given all the information on the existing types of play. A nice welcome 
screen, integrated with the game graphics, just seems like the right thing to 
display.
However, many games (including kbattleship) require to user to enter 
additional information before the game can actually be started. For example, 
in kbattleship, when playing over the network, one has to pick a nickname, 
and enter the tcp connection parameters.
All these additional things tend to complicate the welcome screen interface, 
pushing it to the point where normal gui controls are needed, thus breaking 
the integration with the game graphics, making flicker-free animations 
practically impossible and requiring a lot of programming effort, which is 
essentially wheel reinvention in many aspects (resizing, layouting, handling 
mouse events...).
Plus, the controls are inconsistent with the kde style, and do not use system 
colors. I agree that this may not be a problem for a game, but in this 
particular case, we're not strictly dealing with a game, but with 
the 'initial configuration' needed for a game to be started, which is imho 
quite a different context, and I think that in this case fancy graphics, 
albeit nice, probably get in the way.
On a side note, I've tried a particular approach (double menu, see the 
screenshot in [2]) while integrating KWelcomeScreen in kbattleship, and it 
resulted in a gross failure: even one of our game developers had troubles 
figuring out how to start a network game!
That's not the main point of my rambling, though. The interface can be 
simplified, and we already started working on this, but imho even a 
simplified interface will have the flaws I've tried to describe here.
My proposal is to forget about integrated welcome screens, at least for 
kbattleship, and to add a normal dialog acting as a welcome screen (like 
ksudoku, iirc).
I hope to hear some comments about this, so that I can finally decide an 
approach and follow it. I've been experimenting with this menu for quite some 
time, and I must say I'm a bit tired. I'd like to have all this stuff settled 
down, so I can move on to more interesting things.

Paolo

[1] http://johann.pwsp.net/2007/04/09/a-new-game-starter/
[2] http://commit-digest.org/issues/2007-04-15/