[Kde-games-devel] Theming suport

[Branan Riley]

On Wednesday 14 March 2007 08:14, Mauricio Piacentini wrote:
> Tomasz Boczkowski wrote:
> >   Most of KDE4 games will support themes. I am wondering how to provide
> > theme selection for user. Do we need a common "theme" dialog in
> > libkdegames or each game should have it's own?

There should definitely be a common theming system, both for the dialog and 
the on-disk format. I had an idea that would allow a user to mix-and-match 
sprites from different SVG files (perhaps something for an 'advanced' 
section). The file format would be something like:

[<AppName>Theme]
ThemeName = <themeName>
<SpriteName> = <SvgFile>/<SpriteNameInFile>


So the dialog should probably just be a list of all SVG files in the search 
path that contain _every_ sprite for the game. Then in the advanced section, 
it lists all SVG files in the search path, and lets the user choose which 
sprites from which files (with a nice preview of course). Sequence sprites 
(like a running animation or an explosion) should probably be selected as a 
group - that is, you can't switch out a single frame of an animation.


While I'm up on my soapbox about standardizing, there should probably be a 
standard for sequence sprites, too. Something like:

spriteName_001
spriteName_002
...
spriteName_nnn

That way artists don't have to learn a new scheme for every app.

Branan