[Kde-games-devel] The Future of Game Development in KDE

[Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen]

On Wednesday 09 September 2009 22:04:07 Kleag wrote:
> Le mercredi 9 septembre 2009 14:42:47, Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen a écrit :
> > On Wednesday 09 September 2009 14:29:21 Kleag wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > Le mercredi 9 septembre 2009 13:59:35, Ian Wadham a écrit :
> > > > On Wed, 9 Sep 2009 6:31:34 am Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen wrote:
> > > > > Right. It's that time where i tell you all what i've been pondering
> > > > > on for a while now, so here goes:
> > > > >
> > > > > http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/1098-The-Future-of-Game-Develop
> > > > >me nt -i n- KDE.html
> > > > >
> > > > > The writeup really says it all, so, go go go! :)
> > > >
> > > > Sorry, but that link does not tell me very much at all about Gluon
> > > > ...
> > > >
> > > > :-(
> > > >
> > > > Also, I would challenge some of your basic assumptions.
> > >
> > > (snip)
> > >
> > > > Secondly, as the maintainer of three KDE Games, I don't find the
> > > > integration of sound and graphics into a game to be much of a
> > > > problem, compared to writing the game engine, for example.
> > >
> > > Concerning the game engine, players handling, network stuff, etc. there
> > > is also the libkdegames/kgame library which works very well. I'm still
> > > surprised that no more games use it. Maybe is it because of a lack of
> > > documentations and examples... KsirK uses it since a very long time
> > > with no big problems, except during the kde3 to kde4 porting.
> > >
> > > What will make gluon better than that ?
> >
> >   Gluon for now does not have networking subsystems, and this is likely
> > somewhere libkdegames/kgame could come in. Please, don't think we're
> > trying to do NIH here - anybody who has something to contribute can do
> > so, and if we have well established technologies out there that can help
> > out, then so all the better! :)
> 
> I see. The networking stuff made it very easy to integrate the connection
>  above Jabber, for example. And does Gluon have players and user input
>  handling ? The kgame one works well, making it very easy to handle AI and
>  real users inputs the same way.

  Gluon has a rather powerful input layer, in Linux based on evdev. DrIDK 
posted a video of the config system a couple of days ago at 
http://dridk.blogspot.com/2009/09/kcl.html - what you can't see there is that 
it's able to distinguish between two different mice on the same computer... 
pretty nifty stuff when you see it in action ;) 
http://dridk.blogspot.com/2009/07/kclengine-and-evdev.html is where he posted 
a video of that (at the bottom of the entry)

> > But yes, documentation is problematic - perhaps this is
> > somewhere else we can all get together and work on it :) Is there any
> > documentation available for libkdegames (other than the API-docs)?
> 
> I fear no. I stll have the Martin Heni's example game for KDE3, mykgame (a
> network enabled Tic Tac Toe). I wanted to port it to KDE4 but never found
>  time to do so.
> 
> I suppose the better existing documentation would be the book "Open Source
> Game Development: Qt Games For KDE, PDAs, And Windows" by Martin Heni and
> Andreas Beckermann, but I did not read it. Also, it is about the kde3
>  version.

  Yeah... books have that problem, unfortunately - i even saw it in a 
bookstore here and though "Cool! Oh, kde3..." Kind of anti-climatic ;) A 
shame, though, really is... it's the sort of thing that really does make a 
difference :)

-- 
..Dan // Leinir..
http://leinir.dk/

                          Co-
                            existence
                          or no
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