[Kde-games-devel] KPat Progress and Regressions

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On November 12, 2009, Parker Coates wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 18:41, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > one thing about the animations that have always irked me a bit, but maybe
> > it's just me, is that the speed of the initial auto-solve move (e.g. when
> > a card it moved up to solutions pile in freecell automatically by the
> > game) feels reallly slow, while after a few cards it zings past
> > uncomfortably fast.
> >
> > again, maybe it's just me, but tightening the envelope on the those
> > animations a bit by making the first one faster and the last ones not
> > quite so fast might be a nice improvement.
> 
> Frederik has also expressed an interest in playing with those timings.
> It should be easy enough to do.
> 
> > i also wonder why "change game type" is under settings; it would seem to
> > fit better under "Game"?
> 
> The "why" is because that menu entry replaced the old submenu that
> listed the game types. I agree that it should be moved to the game
> menu, but have never gotten around to it.

cool :)

> I think I'd also like to put
> it in the toolbar (as it's an oft used action), but the lack a good
> icon has stopped me.

toolbar makes sense as well, indeed. maybe a deck of cards would work for the 
icon?

> Do you think the different modes for Klondike and
> Spider should stay in the Settings menu or move to the Game menu as
> well.

i think they make sense in the Settings menu; that's what they are, after all.
 
> > there's a painting oddity in the "select game type" screen:
> >
> >        http://bddf.ca/~aseigo/kpat_pick_error.png
> >
> > it gets triggered when i have kpat on one virtual desktop, switch to
> > another, and then switch back. it might be a Qt bug, but it might also be
> > kpat not painting the background as an optimization though it actually
> > need to? haven't looked at the code, so apologies if it's not a kpat bug.
> > :)
> 
> Fixed. http://websvn.kde.org/?view=rev&revision=1048303

you rock! :)

> > in the "would be nice to have", it would be really nice if the mouse over
> > highlight in the "select game" screen fade in/out rather than just switch
> > between hovered and not (same for mousing over other game elements, such
> > as the card pile "foundation" element).
> 
> This would be nice to have. Patches are very welcome. :)

i'm quited tempted; maybe for kde 4.5 (and we can probably steal code from 
libplasma for this as well since we do this kind of transition a lot in 
plasma)

some other bits of feedback:

* clicking "new" when you're partway through a game and meant to hit "undo" is 
disasterous. a "are you sure you'd like to restart this game" dialog would be 
annoying, however ... i wonder if "new" belongs on the toolbar? if there was a 
way to start a new game from the "you've won!" final screen it would probably 
be enough to have it in the game menu, making accidental "undo -> new" oopses 
rare? or maybe it's not even a big enough issue to worry about.

* when selecting a game from the "choose a game" screen there's a delay of a 
couple of seconds before the game starts. i'd suggest either switching 
immediately away from the "choose a game" screen so the user knows that their 
choice has been registered or making the transition to the selected game a lot 
faster. 

(amazingly cool would be if you clicked on a game from "choose a game" that it 
"zoomed" to full window and became the playable game; but yes, that's probably 
something to dream about at this point rather than realistic for 4.4 :)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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