[Kde-games-devel] New Mazes game in KGoldrunner

[Ian Wadham]

On Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:45:50 am Luciano Montanaro wrote:

Hey, long time no see, Luciano! ... :-)

> On martedì 13 ottobre 2009, Ian Wadham wrote:
> > I have just committed the latest set of KGoldrunner levels from
> > Steve Mann, who previously contributed the Count and Curse
> > of the Mummy levels.  This time the theme is mazes and the
> > levels are named after dwarfs from myth and story.  These
> > great new levels are for release with KDE 4.4 in early February.
>
> That's really great to see, Ian, it seems we actually have a "community" of
> contents contributors. Although a small one, for now.
>
Very small ... just Steve Mann, who contributed the last 3 games ... :-)

> Have you anything else in store for KGoldrunner?
>
Just updated kdegames/kgoldrunner/TODO and committed it.  I am not sure
how much time I will have between now and Message Freeze, so I have
not put anything much on the KDE 4.4 Feature Plan yet.

One thing will be some major changes to KGrTheme and KGrCanvas, to
avoid having to do a SVG load every time KGoldrunner runs.  It will now
load a theme only if it was never loaded before or if a newly-required size
is not in the cache and will have to be rendered.  I expect to commit this
change in the next few days.

Actually I have had another major project lately: building a wooden digger
machine for my grandson's sandpit.  Real deadline: his third birthday, a week
or two ago.  He is delighted with it ... :-)

Also I have been playing around with a rewrite of KSokoban.  I have a
toy version running, but with just circles and squares in the graphics.
When it is reasonably playable, I will put it in playground/games, maybe
with a view to a KDE 4.5 release.

> I've been at the Gluon sprint earlier this week, and they have in store a
> few things we could put to use in KGoldrunner when they are finalized. The
> KAL (Audio library, based onOpenAL) would be a nice and easy alternative to
> phonon, for example. And it may be a nice way to help out the great Gluon
> crew to find bugs or missing features. I'll try to work on this and send
> patches; they need not be integrated in KGoldrunner until after the 4.4
> release, of course.
>
Hmmmm ... I was dubious of the reality of Gluon earlier on in this list, with
its paucity of information and mysterious "Dr IDK" in the background, but
if you have seen it up close and can vouch for it, Luciano, I'll go with that.
Take note that I reorganized KGoldrunner sound code a bit for KDE 4.3.

I did find info about OpenAL and it seemed to be a much better basis for
games sounds than Xine, etc.  However I am worried about introducing
dependencies outside the regular kdelibs, libkdegames, Qt set.  That
could adversely affect future compilation, building and distribution of
KGoldrunner itself, for the gain of just a little sound quality.

Why is there not an OpenAL backend for Phonon?  Is the world of sound
in KDE and Qt limited to notifications and Amarok tracks?  On Apple, for
example, my son has a fully-fledged music composition and mixing studio,
though it is not FOSS.  He used it when composing the KGoldrunner sounds.

Cheers, Ian W.