[Kde-games-devel] More palapeli reviewing (was: How do you play jigsaw puzzles)

[Stefan Majewsky]

Am Dienstag 20 Oktober 2009 21:20:13 schrieb Matthew Woehlke:
> - A function to 'unclump' pieces (mainly, to separate overlapping
> pieces) would also be useful :-). I think I would do this as a tool;
> select the 'unclump' function (usual function is 'move piece'), and
> click somewhere, and pieces in that vicinity are 'unclumped'. Think of
> it like running your fingers lightly over the pieces to push around ones
> that are higher due to having other pieces underneath them.

Moved to mid-term todolist. I think this can be combined with some other 
requested feature: having one piece push other pieces out of its way while 
dragging it. The unclumping is the same action, just without a piece attached 
to the cursor. It would be toggled by some modifier, e.g. Ctrl.

> I'm finding that 1000-piece puzzles are almost unplayable without
> features to manage large numbers of pieces. The previously mentioned
> 'box sorting' would be really helpful, or see suggestion in next
> paragraph, but I could also really use a function to select and move a
> bunch of pieces at once. Think of shoving a bunch of pieces aside with
> the edge of your hand.

Palapeli is starting out as a platform for small puzzles, and aims to increase 
the possible puzzle size slowly, but steadily. I want a solid puzzling engine 
for now, advanced management and convenience features to cope with big puzzles 
will be added later (i.e. KDE 4.5).

> Something that emulates picking up a bunch of pieces in your hand and
> putting them down again would be extremely helpful. This plus unclump
> would reduce the importance of 'box sorting'.

Rubberband selection is already on the midterm todolist.

> I'm also getting really frustrated with the inconsistency of clicking.
> Half the time when I try to move a piece, I end up dragging the table
> instead. Sometimes I want to drag the table and get a piece instead. But
> most annoying is when I need to drag a piece past the visible table.

Expect a solution to these problems to appear very soon.

> I think this should be solved by dropping the right-click background
> chooser, and instead using only right click to drag the table.

Both streamlining the texture selection (which includes making it more 
visible) and assigning rightclick to table dragging are on the todolist.

> You've already got something that works well for small (100-piece)
> puzzles, and feels like it will be an excellent base for future
> development. I can't say I've come across a computer jigsaw puzzle game
> (CJPG) before that tries to tackle the four-digits-worth-of-pieces
> puzzle genre, but from what I've seen, palapeli could do it. First off,
> you're on the right track for getting the "feel" right; you haven't made
> the mistakes that I usually see that give CJPGs a 'wrong' feel compared
> to physical jigsaws. The performance is also there; palapeli *shines* on
> a 1200-piece, 4096x1536 image puzzle. What's missing is just a few
> features to make that many pieces manageable without causing major
> repetitive stress injury ;-).

I appreciate your kind words. I expect a performance bottleneck in the drop 
shadow renderer (although, in the process of creating it, I've already found a 
way to speed up the QGraphicsDropShadowEffect by 75%). Apart from that, it all 
hinges with QGraphicsView's rendering speed (which seems to have greatly 
improved in 4.6 again).

> Add mis-rotated pieces to bring that extra bit of real world challenge,
> fix the 'what do I want to move' ambiguity, fix not being able to deal
> with multiple pieces at once, and I think you're really going to have
> something great.

Moved to long-term todolist (requires investigation on what input methods are 
intuitive for this).

Greetings
Stefan
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