[Kde-games-devel] KGoldrunner themes

[Ian Wadham]

As the final release of KDE 4 approaches I am becoming increasingly
concerned about three issues in KGoldrunner:

    a) Playability and look of the Default theme.
    b) Playability of the Geek City theme.
    a) The ever-increasing time it takes to load a theme.

I'm getting desperate, especially with Eugene being out of action.
I think I need to use the Default theme for screenshots in the doco very
soon, but I do not know how soon that should be.  What deadline?
The doco still has the KDE 3 graphics !!!  Not a good look.

At present I find the default bricks too garish and too highly patterned
when viewed en masse.  Oxygen just does not seem to have good
subdued earthy colors, such as real bricks have.

The new "jungle" background is great, but there are huge contrasts
between elements of the background.  I am actually finding some easy
levels quite hard to play ...  The enemies almost vanish in front of the
dark leaves and the gold and poles are hard to see against the sky.

The background of Geek City still does not give good contrast to the
foreground elements for gameplay.  This is a long-standing problem.

Re timing: last time I did major work on KGoldrunner I was able to get
all theme-loading times down to 2 seconds or less on my setup, which
has no graphics acceleration.  That was about 3 months ago, just before
Eugene released the Egypt theme.  Egypt came in at about 3-4 secs.
Now I am getting the following timings for a theme change:

    0.7 sec B & W theme and Nostalgia themes
    2.7 sec Default theme
    5.1 sec Geek City
    8.3 sec Treasures of Egypt

If you add SVG loading time, when the game starts up, these times are
expanded by about 50% and Egypt, for example, takes 12+ seconds.
Other KDE Games seem to have slower loading times too.

Nobody has commented, so I have been assuming it is just a problem
on my setup, but how can I be sure?  In the last 3 months there have
been lots of changes in Qt (including QSvgRenderer), in KDE core and
in the SVG files themselves.

Any ideas or reassurances anyone? ... Ian W.