[Kde-games-devel] When will background be configurable?

[Matthew Woehlke]

Parker Coates wrote:
> Is there really anyone who cares that much
> about card backs, but who wouldn't be willing open up the SVGs to make
> a deck of their own.

Only the first part of that sentence is interesting. For non-developers, 
making a deck is a *lot* of work (at least to a lazy user), especially 
if you don't even know that you can do such a thing (much less where the 
decks are located, how to install new ones, etc).

Oh, and, do we even support user decks right now? (That is, ones in 
$KDEHOME and not installed?) If not, now the user must also be root to 
make a new deck.

> It also ensures consistency while keeping thing simple for deck
> designers.

I refuse to believe that "we'll do it this way because it is 'keeping 
thing simple for deck designers"' is anything but a cop-out :-).

> Maybe if you'd done more programming and "Les Whinen", it could've
> been included in 4.2, but as it is, we're stuck with what we've got
> until 4.3. ;)

Touche. Unfortunately the latter takes longer and I've been in short 
supply of time :-(.

(On that note, what am I supposed to do with my Diamond deck? I've asked 
several times, gotten feedback, etc, but no one has told me what I can 
do with it. Except that we're now past hard-freeze :-(, I would have 
liked to be able to commit it, or at least get it on whatever HNS system 
(if any?) is being used. While not a fair analogy for many reasons, that 
sort of 'lack of direction from the people actually in charge of the 
repo' isn't exactly conducive to writing patches either.)

> Technically, you can't really "remove" a choice that the user never
> really had in the first place. In fact adding the background to the
> theme would technically be giving them more background choice than
> they currently have, but I see where you're coming from.
> 
> I could be convinced that a separate background selection is a
> worthwhile feature, but I really can't see the usefulness of
> independent card backs and fronts. But then again, maybe I'm just
> biased because I mostly play Simple Simon where you don't see any card
> backs at all.

:-D

Obviously, independent backs would be more useful if we had more of 
them... and that's partly what I'm thinking; it's /easy/ to make new 
backs (except that we'd then have a new problem designing a selector), I 
could easily see having dozens or even hundreds of choices of card back. 
(Physical card decks similarly come in nearly any variant you can 
imagine.) But I very much doubt we'd ever see more than maybe two dozen 
fronts. Anyone wanting a particular back is almost certainly going to 
just copy an existing deck, which leads to duplication.

Anyway... that's where I'm coming from.

(That said, I probably /would/ help out with the art side of the backs, 
if there would be consensus to go this way. Did I mention that there 
feels to be a lack of "it's ok to commit" going on here?)

-- 
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
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