[Kde-games-devel] KPat Progress and Regressions

[Parker Coates]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 14:22, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On November 12, 2009, Parker Coates wrote:
>> 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?

Lots of things would work for the icon. The problem is getting an
artist to actually produce one. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, artists.

> * 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,

There already is such a dialog. It has been there for years. See the
attached screenshot. Obviously you chose "Do not ask again" a long
time ago and have forgotten about it. :)

> 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.

The reason I like having New on the toolbar is that I generally don't
play unwinnable games and sometimes it takes a few clicks to find
something winnable or unknown. I've never made the misclick you
mention, so I can really say how big an issue it is.

> * 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.

This delay is due to the time required to render the cards from SVG.
As you mention in a later mail, this isn't so bad if the card pixmaps
are already in the cache at the required size. I remember in a
previous version, this delay occurred after the empty game area was
shown. This was awkward too, but probably could be considered better
feedback. I'll play around with this, to see if it can be easily
improved.

> (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 :)

This would be neat, but also pretty much impossible with the current
KPat architecture. The game selection screen and each of the different
game types are currently separate QGraphicsScene instances. I don't
think there's any way to smoothly animate from one scene to another.

Thanks for the feedback.

Parker
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