[Kde-games-devel] Kolf rewrite (includes important design question even for non-coders)

[Matthew Woehlke]

Stefan Majewsky wrote:
> Enough with the technical details. (Once I get to write some headers, I'll put 
> them in playground/games/kolf-ng for public review.) Now I have an important 
> question: Do you prefer backwards compatibility with Kolf 1.x courses (of 
> course not including courses relying on the buggy behavior of Kolf 1.x) or do 
> you want me to through away the old format etc. and try something more 
> logical? In this case, I would make the whole landscape a single object (now, 
> every slope and puddle is a single object) to avoid unlogical combinations of 
> slopes ending at the same height level and such. On the other hand, this 
> option would be far more challenging because the landscape will have to be 
> prerendered, including a much more complex theme format. The editor would also 
> be more complex, but I'm confident we could solve this.

First off, one issue I had/have with the current theme is that it's 
nigh-impossible to tell what's going on slope-wise.

Have you considered at all just making the courses actual heightfields? 
Obviously this would totally break compatibility, but you'd gain great 
possibilities for true irregular terrain. (Plus drop-offs, which I don't 
think are currently supported?) This would also need a totally new 
physics engine, but since you're only dealing with a heightfield, it 
would be a consistent one. (And there are probably such engines already 
written; balls rolling around landscapes is certainly not a new problem. 
That said, I don't think it's a particularly /hard/ problem, either.)

(The editor would be an interesting challenge, since a trivial editor 
would be a simple paint tool, but for kolf what you actually want is the 
ability to make flat areas.)

I must admit, I also wondered about ditching the 2D model entirely and 
going 3D with OpenGL. (Besides that anything that works in 3D isn't 
terribly complicated to push back down into 2D; you could make both 
modes an option, or even have separate versions that share courses.)

-- 
Matthew
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