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

[Luciano Montanaro]

On domenica 18 ottobre 2009, Ian Wadham wrote:
> On Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:45:50 am Luciano Montanaro wrote:
> 
> Hey, long time no see, Luciano! ... :-)

Yes, sorry about that, I've been very busy at work up to july, and then 
vacation, etc. you know...
But I've kept an eye on KGoldrunner, KDE 4.3 version is very nice.

> >
> > 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 ... :-)
> 

Yes, I noticed. Let's hope it will grow... But still, it means we have at 
least an happy player. Did you ask him to comment on our development plan, and 
see if there are features he's missing, in the editor or in the game?
I'm not sure if he may want to join in the mailing list, but the point of view 
of a "modder" could be interesting to hear also by other game developers.

> > 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.
>

Oh, yes, we still load the svg file on startup. I tend to use my simple 
themes, so I do not notice that much, but of course, we should load the svg 
only when needed.
 
> 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 ... :-)
> 

Of course, life is not only programming. :)

> 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.
> 

Another nice game, and anothergame where user made content cam keep the game 
going on and on... 
Did you manage to reuse any code from katomic, by chance? The games are 
similar, except for the game logic itself.

> > 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.
>

Well, the libraries are in various states of development, of course, but they 
are already usable. The blok game is the testing ground for all of the 
components, and it's quite fun to play...
You can have a look at what it is here:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whxl7JTixc8

> 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.
> 

OpenAL is an external dependency, but a "shallow" one - it does not in itself 
require other larger libraries that are not already needed for KDE. And it's 
available on most (probably all) the platforms we have ported KDE to, so I 
think it is not an unreasonable dependency. But anyway, I'm planning to keep 
the current phonon code there, and add a runtime check for KAL. If it's there, 
I'll dlopen KAL and use it, otherwise I'll use Phonon.

> Why is there not an OpenAL backend for Phonon?

Because OpenAL is a low level library (it does not really understands anything 
but PCM, by itself) while Phonon deals mainly with high level, stuff- it has 
no way to deal with sample buffers directly.
 
> Is the world of sound
> in KDE and Qt limited to notifications and Amarok tracks?

It looks so, at the moment. I'm not sure of the roadmap for phonon either, Qt 
4.6 introduces a new lower level api QtMultimedia API that has support with 
some of the things we need in games, and bypasses Phonon completely. There has 
been some discussion about that at the Sprint and at the conference, but I 
don't know what will come of it at the end.

> 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.

I've never looked at a Mac too closely in the last ten years, but I'm sure 
there is good software for that. And the audio stack in Linux is a mess...
I hope we'll not add to that, though.

Tschüß,
Luciano


-- 
Luciano Montanaro //
                \X/ mikelima at cirulla.net