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

[Matt Williams]

On Tuesday 21 October 2008 17:50:11 Parker Coates wrote:
> 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

From a purely release team point of view, I'm dubious about releasing 
something that changes existing functionality without more testing, 
especially after the soft freeze. It it was adding an entirely new feature I 
may be more lenient. On the other hand, this could be seen as a bug fix and 
so if one or to two more people could confirm that the patch works for them 
then I'll allow it for 4.2.

In other news, I'm not dead; just very busy with University on account of it 
being my Masters year. I'm not going to have much time for big coding 
projects but I'm still able to keep up maintainership of my stuff and 
continue as Module Coordinator.

Regards,
Matt Williams
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