[Kde-games-devel] Thoughts about the card deck dialog and card themes

[Luciano Montanaro]

Hi all.

We have discussed this briefly during our IRC conferences, but it still may be 
better to discuss it on the list as well.

I have a few issues on the card deck dialog, which I think should be addressed 
before KDE 4, since then we'll have less liberty at fixing them.

- The dialog itself looks a very crowded
- The selection of card backs independent of the card front is a bit 
  problematic, since decks may have different sizes, and the backs would 
  result stretched. 
- What is the global deck feature for? If it is meant to set the card deck 
  for all the games, it is misplaced. A game dialog should not change 
  behaviour for other games.

I much prefer the Theme selector interface; it is simpler and cleaner. It also 
offers a way to fetch new themes from a server, which is a useful addition.

So maybe we should model our deck selection in terface on that.
In fact, it would be better to use a deck selection widget and implement the 
deck dialog on top of it for games that do not have a configuration dialog.

If it were not for the different desktop files, the theme dialog would already 
work. Is there a standard already for the card decks we have to use?

If that is not practical, a new widget/dialog combination may be an 
alternative. It should work for card decks and mah-jongg tiles as well, since 
they share many properties...

Finally we have been talking about removing somne of the card decks. 
Personally, I would keep SVG only decks with the kdegames distribution, and 
keep the other decks as knewstuff downloads. And I would get rid of the card 
backs entirely:

The SVG decks have already their own, which is designed to match the cards 
properly. We may still add variations on the backs in each SVG file, for 
games where having more than one makes sense, later on.

The current backs do not look that great anyway...

Luciano