[Kde-games-devel] Re : What to do for default theme for Kapman?

[Matthew Woehlke]

Thomas Gallinari wrote:
> Hi all !
> 
> Pierre-Benoit Besse, Gaël Courcelle and me (we both worked on Kapman this year) have just finished our exams so we are now ready to do all the stuff we were told about Kapman, that is to say :
> - Documentation
> - Original (not commercial like) artwork => need artists !!!!!

You can also talk to Eugene Trounev, either here or on #kdegames (it-s). 
Last night he suggested a "motorcycle" theme that I think would be 
workable as a default; I can still see calling the main character in 
that "Kapman" :-), and it's nothing like the "commercial" graphics.

I am still going to try to contribute art as well. Recently I haven't 
had time as I've been trying to upgrade the RAM in my machine, and also 
I just switched over to using KDE4 as my desktop environment.

Hmm, we should also have a dragon theme with konqui ;-).

...That brings my idea list to 9 themes.

> - Theming support

 From IRC, I believe Eugene also said he would prefer tile-based drawing 
:-) (I think the comment was something along the lines of 'I like/want 
custom mazes'). I already have that code done; we need to get to 
coordinating what to do with my outstanding patches.

> - Configurable keys
> - Increase the difficulty

That's easy, do something better with the AI ;-).

I was thinking about this yesterday, for multiple personalities, maybe 
these would work:

hunter - knows where something was eaten last, uses pathfinding to go 
there with time-weighted bias to ignoring the path (so if you run around 
not eating anything, he slowly switches to random wandering)

clown - moves totally randomly, less likely to chase the player with 
line-of-sight, doesn't follow turns

patroller - maintains 'last visited' for the maze, tends to go down 
passages that were visited least recently

psychic - tends to go towards the player without regard to the maze 
(i.e. if the player is below and to the right, tends to go down or right)

Except for clown, I think it would be nice if the AI would bias making 
the last turn the player made. I think this is realistic; if I am 
chasing someone in a maze, I may not see them after they turn to go down 
a side corridor, but I saw them go into said corridor.

The quickest thing would be to implement the 'psychic' variant for all 
ghosts; I can attest that this AI seems to work well in practice as it's 
what I use in Hatman. It's also very simple to implement as it requires 
no additional data structures (unlike the hunter/patroller AI's) and 
only a few lines of code changes.

> We'd like to finish all that stuff before supplying any other change... Our first goal is to make Kapman ready for 4.1 release, then it will be "mature" for further features.

...except that having the code in a state where others are comfortable 
contributing will help *get* there. Especially if no one wants to make 
whole-maze svg's ;-). Anyway, I will try to contact your team off-list 
to discuss these thoughts further.

> Matthew, even if artwork is original I think there is no need to change the game name : Kapman sounds like "Pacman clone for KDE", that's quite good for me...

My main concern was that the name wouldn't fit the default theme at all, 
but for now we have an idea that works :-).

-- 
Matthew
Yesterday, I thought of the best .sig that has ever been contemplated. 
Alas, I forgot it before I could write it down.