[Kde-games-devel] [PATCH] Change to KNetwalk move counting

[Parker Coates]

Hello all,

The attached patch is a rather simple change to KNetwalk to change how
it counts "moves". It implements the behaviour requested in bug
167592. [1]

Instead of calculating the optimal number of clicks needed to solve
the puzzle, it now calculates the number of pieces that have to be
moved. Instead of counting each 90 degree rotation of a piece as a
move, it now considers all consecutive clicks on a single piece as a
single move.

With the current implementation, a game showing great highscore
potential can easily be ruined by a single click of the wrong button
or an extra click of the correct one. The patch generally makes the
game less frustrating without making the puzzles easier to solve. I
think most would agree the KNetwalk is about geometric thinking, not
about visual-motor skills.

There is one situation where this change is less forgiving, but I'm
not sure if it's common enough to worry about.  With the existing
implementation, if a piece needed to be moved 180 degrees and the
player moved it 90 degrees, moved some other pieces, and then move the
first piece the second 90 degrees, they wouldn't be penalised. With
the patch, the piece will be considered as moved twice, but if the
clicks had been consecutive it would have only been considered one
move.

I realise that I've missed the soft feature freeze with this. I've
been running this patch locally for about a month, but had actually
forgotten about it. I just noticed it this morning when doing an "svn
status" on kdegames. I'm not really proposing this as a must-have
change, but more as an alternative implementation that I happen to
think is nicer, so comments are welcome.

Parker

[1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=167592
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