[Kde-games-devel] Hybrid svg graphics...

[Luciano Montanaro]

Hi all,
it's me again with some more controversial argument...

An introduction, first.

I installed the gnome games, to have a look at the status of gaming on our  
pointy-hat friend's platform.

AisleRiot uses svg graphics too. They ship five decks of cards in svg format.

Two of them use an hybrid approach where the indices and suits are vector 
graphics, while the court cards use pixmaps as the main graphics.

The thing I did not know (or think about, actually) is that it's possible to 
embed the pixmap as base64 data. So it may be practical to create single-file 
card deck in svg format, if we want. 

Actually, switching to svg only themes should simplify the common card caching 
code Andreas is developing... 

The other thing I noticed is that Gnome ships a dondorf deck too...
It is much smaller though, and much faster to load, and it uses pixmaps for 
the court cards.

I think it looks better even when scaled up... though I've heard others whose 
opinion differs.

Here is an image demonstrating the two decks...

http://www.cirulla.net/listing/kde_stuff/vector-pixmap.png

The one on the right is the pixmap version, on the left is the svg version.
At normal screen resolutions, there should be really little difference... 
actually, the pixmap version colors should be more saturated. 

From my point of view, the smooth lines at normally unreachable resolutions is 
not worth the extra time it takes to load the theme...

Another "interesting" thing in Gnome decks is that the numbers do not render 
with with the Qt renderer. It would be interesting to find out why.

To conclude:
maybe we should think a bit more about the "only vectors allowed" kdegames 
policy. I think there are places for old school pixmap images too...
For example, pixmap images larger than any current screen resolution can be a 
solution where an svg file would be too slow to load quickly.

Do not misunderstand me: vectors are great, and the current games use vector 
graphics very well. However, it makes little sense in my opinion to use 
automatic tools to convert pixmaps to vector, since the result is  
uneditable, it's slow to load and does not really look as good as the 
original anyway...

Well, that's all for now.

Ciao,
Luciano