[Kde-games-devel] Chess game for KDE4

[Ian Wadham]

On Friday 04 December 2009 8:27:08 pm Stefan Majewsky wrote:
> Am Freitag, 4. Dezember 2009 10:12:43 schrieb Dmitry Suzdalev:
> > By the way, questions to all: what's the status of KGameCanvas? Now that
> >  QGV had stabilized and matured should we keep it in libkdegames? Are
> > there cases when KGameCanvas would be still prefered over QGV? Are there
> > any games in kdegames which use it? (i didn't to grepping yet ;))
> 
> If usage of KGC is discouraged, then @deprecated flags should be added to
>  the APIDOX. http://lxr.kde.org/ident?&i=KGameCanvasPixmap tells me that at
>  least Bomber, KBattleShip, KBounce, KBreakout and KGoldRunner use
>  KGameCanvas.
> 
Just to remind everybody ... there are three reasons to prefer KGameCanvas
over QGV ... speed, speed and speed.  I do not know if QGV is yet fast enough
all the time to run KGoldrunner.  It always was fast enough most of the time, 
but you cannot tolerate hiccups of a substantial fraction of a second, while
QGV decides to go off and do some housekeeping, if your game is running
to a 50 msec timescale.

Similar concerns might apply to Bomber, KBounce and KBreakout, though
perhaps not to KBattleship and KMahjongg ... and certainly not to Chess.

I do not know if I will ever drum up the enthusiasm to benchmark QGV
all over again, let alone re-program KGoldrunner using QGV.

If KGCanvas were ever to depart, I might consider going to 2-D OpenGL.
I found out when writing Kubrick that OpenGL is blisteringly fast compared
to any offerings based on Qt (such as QGV and KGCanvas).  I think that is
why OpenGL is behind Qt paint engine and composite graphics trickery in
KDE 4 windows.

All the best, Ian W.