[Kde-games-devel] The Future of Kolf

[Ian Wadham]

It is great to read the thread "Kolf Art?" and see the huge
amount of work that is taking place on Kolf 2.  Congratulations
Stefan, Zeng Huan and Arturo --- and welcome aboard Arturo!
Referring back to that thread ...

On Sat, 5 Sep 2009 5:22:05 am Stefan Majewsky wrote:
> Am Mittwoch 02 September 2009 22:37:33 schrieb Arturo Silva:
> > You've supplied plenty of food for thought, but bottom line for my end
> > is we need some pleasant pattern textures and FAST so that we can meet
> > the 4.4 deadline, where Kolf 2 should look and perform at least en par
> > with Kolf 1.
>
> I'm pretty sure that we can't have feature parity. Because Kolf 2 is
> physically correct, we'll lose all Kolf 1 courses, and some objects will be
> missing. The editor might have some rough edges, and the OpenGL parts will
> not be in the first release. Still, I think we'll perform better on other
> fronts, and the codebase will be much better.
>
It looks as though there will not be time to design, build and test many
courses for Kolf 2 before the KDE 4.4 release, even supposing we have a
course designer among us.

So what I propose is that we keep *both* Kolfs in KDE Games until Kolf 2
has had time to mature and acquire its own repertoire of courses.  That
way, existing Kolf players will still be able to enjoy a round or two and
they will also be able to see the shape of things to come in Kolf 2.

Re maintenance of Kolf 1, I will offer to save it from any further risks of
extinction, as I did in KDE 4.3.  I can not stand by and watch years of
work go down the gurgler because of some change in the libraries.

However, I will not have the time nor the ability to address the many
irritating bugs in Kolf 1, so I am not offering to become Kolf 1's full
time maintainer.

There are just not enough comments in the code to understand what
is going on.  And there is no overview of classes.  That all makes the
code very hard to maintain.  At least there are meaningful class, data
and method names ... :-)

Thoughts anyone?

All the best, Ian W.

P.S. Stefan, I really enjoyed your blog on maintenance and program doco:
http://majewsky.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/code-documentation-is-really-important/

Unfortunately, I read it too late to post a reply on Wordpress.  This has been
a topic dear to my heart ever since the late 60s.  I could tell you some
stories ... maybe I should start a blog ... ;-)