[Kde-games-devel] Kpat and card style chooser

[Parker Coates]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 03:37, Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> If anything, we should allow the decks to provide also the placeholder
> shape that is drawn over the background...
>
> Obviously it's not to be done for next release, but I think we should
> really drop the "decks" directory in 4.3, and provide a way to select
> the back variants from the card requester, if it's really needed. I'm
> not really that much interested in having back variants, myself, as
> long as the default one is reasonable, but choice is good, isn't it?

I personally think the independent selection of card fronts and backs
is a simple case of over customisability. When buying a real deck of
cards, you're pretty much stuck choosing the front and back at the
same time. It also seems a bit odd that in KPat 4.2 you can choose
card backs independently, but not the background image which is
something I would assume a lot more people would be interested in
customising.

My vote for 4.3 would be to let each "deck" provide _one_ back and
_one_ drop target (or whatever it's called). Along with this, I think
we should drop support for "old style" decks altogether. We now have
plenty of SVG decks to choose from and if anyone really wants the to
keep a particular old deck, it could be wrapped in an SVG (as
discussed in the past on this list) along with a back and drop target.

If that were done, I think we could greatly simplify (and beautify)
the card selection dialog. I'm picturing a nice big preview showing
something like the following.

  ------    ---- ---- ---- ---- ------
 |      |  | A  | K  | Q  | J  | 10 ♠ |
 | BACK |  |    |    |    |    |      |
 |      |  | ♠  | ♥  | ♣  | ♦  | ♠ 10 |
  ------    ---- ---- ---- ---- ------

Of course, if we're in the process of unifying decks, then maybe it
makes sense to also include backgrounds and transition from "decks" to
"themes". It works for our other games, why not for our card games?
For example, the current default background looks very nice when
combined with the Royal Jolly deck, but looks a bit odd when combined
with one of the cleaner, simpler decks like, say, Nicu Ornamental.
Letting deck designers choose their backgrounds seems pretty
reasonable to me.

Anyway, those are just my opinions. I'm neither a KPat developer nor a
card deck designer, just a KPat user.

Parker