[Kde-games-devel] kbattleship and welcome screen

[Mauricio Piacentini]

Nicolas Roffet wrote:
> On Tue, June 12, 2007 10:36, Paolo Capriotti wrote:
>> After a number of failed attempts and experiment, I'm starting to be a bit
>> dubious about the whole 'welcome screen' thing
> 
> I agree with you. These screens look really nice. However, I'm not a good
> friend of them (I mean not convinced yet) because:
>  - it looks like Flash games but not like traditional desktop application
> so we have a consistency problem within KDE.
>  - you're right with the "re-invent the wheel"-thing". There are many
> issues with layouts (for instance with i18n if you have a long text in a
> foreign language).

I agree with you completely. Some of these points were raised a while 
ago in IRC discussions, when we are deciding what to do with statusbars 
and toolbars. There was no agreement, some people prefer the 
desktop-integration path, while others prefer the game-special-interface 
one. But I believe that having the KWelcomeScreen experiment in 
kbattleship is a good thing so we can actually see the problems (and 
solutions) it brings in action, and not only speculate on them.

For me, KDE games should in theory implement the desktop metaphors and 
behave just like any other KDE application. This means toolbars and 
menus for actions, and status bar for feedback. Standard KDE config 
dialogs and menu entries should be used as well. The point is to make 
the game fit perfectly into the KDE-desktop style and provide 
consistency. This will also guarantee that the games age well in the 
future, as changes in the KDE UI and styles will automatically be 
reflected, without the need for new in-game specific code. So for 
KMahjongg and KMines for example I plan to stick to these guidelines for 
now at least. But maybe having some games with KWelcomeScreen-type 
solutions could also be a good experiment during the beta, so we can get 
user feedback on it.

Regards,
Mauricio Piacentini