[Kde-games-devel] KScoreDialog and KGameDifficulty bugs

[Matt Williams]

Hey everyone,

I went through my KScoreDialog bugs trying to track down the reasons for them. 
Most of the bugs were related to i18n which is often a cause for confusion 
for me :)

Before I talk about the bugs I first need to explain how KScoreDialog works, 
particularly with respect to the score groups. When you pass a group name 
string to KScoreDialog::setConfigGroup() it is that string which is used as 
the KConfig group name. Because of this is it necessary to pass the string 
through an I18N_NOOP(). This has the effect that the string is added to the 
database to be translated but it is still the raw (untranslated) string that 
is passed to KScoreDialog and then used as the group name. Later on, inside 
KScoreDialog when the group name is due to be displayed to the UI it is 
passed through i18n() which displays the translated string from the game's 
translation database.

There became a problem when KGameDifficulty came out and and many games 
started using it (but not ksquares which is why I haven't noticed this until 
now) in that games would do setConfigGroup(KGameDifficulty::levelString()). 
This is a problem since KGameDifficulty::levelString() returns a translated 
string! This had two effects: firstly that KScoreDialog would save the scores 
to a different KConfig group depending on what language the game was run as 
and secondly that when KScoreDialog came to run i18n() over the group name 
for display in the UI it was being passed an already translated string 
(either directly or via the config file) and so bugs were cropping up.

To get around all this I've added a function to KGameDifficulty which returns 
the level difficulty but as an untranslated string (it is however passed 
through I18N_NOOP() so that KScoreDialog can display the translated version 
to the UI later). It is this string which must be passed to KScoreDialog 
(KGameDifficulty::untranslatedLevelString()).

The attached patch adds this function and patches Kollision, KMines and 
KNetwalk to use it correctly. I've tested it with Kollision with the x-test 
language (I couldn't get the other two to work correctly with x-test but the 
patch still stands). and in fact allows me to close about 4 different bugs 
which had been assigned to KScoreDialog :D

The only downside to this is that there's now duplication in the strings 
needing to be translated, i.e. there's both a 
  I18N_NOOP("Easy");
and a 
  i18nc("Game difficulty level 3 out of 8", "Easy");
since the i18n() call in KScoreDialog can't match its no-context string to the 
i18nc() string entry. This shouldn't be a problem but I though I'd mention 
it.

There's probably a number of other games out there which are using 
KGameDifficulty and have this same bug which I haven't mentioned in the patch 
so be sure to patch your game if you might be suffering from this bug. Even 
if you're not using KGameDifficulty you will need to make sure that any 
string which you pass to KScoreDialog::setConfigGroup() is in its 
untranslated form but has, at some point, been passed through an I18N_NOOP(). 
I've updated both the apidocs and the techbase tutorial [1] to reflect this.

If anyone's got any real complaints about this then reply here but this email 
is mostly for your information. I'll commit tomorrow if there's no 
complaints.

Regards,
Matt Williams

[1] http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Games/Highscores
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