[Kde-games-devel] Some feedback on KPat

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

I recently took at look at KPat in KDE 4.1, and was very impressed. 
It’s a great improvement from the KDE 3.5.x version.

Some things I like:

– The cards (especially Oxygen White and Nicu Ornamental) are beautiful.
– The animation looks very good. I especially like the animation when
  a stack is moved to the foundation in Spider.
– The info in the statusline on whether a game is solvable or not. It’s
  very interesting to see that for example a simple, seemingly ’innocent’,
  move can make the game unsolvable.

I have one question on the solvability info, though. Often it just times
out, which is quite annoying. And then a trivial move (e.g., moving a red
4 from one black 5 to another, which is easily revertible) may make it able
to calculate whether the game is solvable.

Is there a reason the timeout is set so low (< 1 second?), e.g. memory
consumption? Neither the game nor the user is doing anything when nothing
is happening in the game, so why not let use the CPU try to calculate more
if there is a solution (since a trivial move often makes it find a
solution, or discover that there are none, it is obviously ‘close’ when the
timeout occurs).

-- 
Karl Ove Hufthammer