[Kde-games-devel] moved Kajongg from playground to kdereview

[Wolfgang Rohdewald]

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On Saturday 13 February 2010, Wolfgang Rohdewald wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I just moved Kajongg to kdereview, aiming to get it into
> KDE core kdegames 4.5
> 
> Kajongg implements the traditional game of Mah Jong played by four
> players. It has two modes: You can play against the computer or
> against other players over the net, or you play as usual and only
> use Kajongg for computing scores. Computing scores is a rather
> tricky aspect of Mah Jong so I definitively expect users who
> mostly use this part (like myself).
> 
> A special problem of Mah Jong is that there are many different rule
> sets worldwide, and it is absolutely normal to negotiate rules
> before starting to play. I have good support for customized
> ruleset definitions. A player starting a new table on the game
> server defines the ruleset to be played on that table. Still
> missing: The other players need a diff function to see which of
> their own rulesets matches the table ruleset most closely and what
> differences there are between any two rulesets.
> 
> I wrote an extensive english user manual (docbook), and I
> translated it into German. Others translated around 100% to
> Ukrainian, Swedish, Spanish and Portuguese.
> 
> The user manual however does not explain the gaming rules. Please
> look them up at Wikipedia. Or try kajongg.py --automode, start a
> new game (CTRL-P), login to localhost, select a ruleset, press
> Start in the table list. Now 4 computer players are playing
> against each other. This is not quite a demo mode since the
> dialogs that should normally be answered by the players only
> flicker. I added this only for testing. But you can see some
> action. The winner has 4 groups of 3 or four tiles each (identical
> or sequence) plus a pair of identical tiles.
> 
> There are definitively more features I want to add like voices,
> more rulesets, more intelligent computer players, suspend/resume
> of games but I think there should be enough value for KDE core.
> 
> Homepage:
> http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php/kajongg?content=103206
> 
> Technical:
> 
> Kajongg is a pure Python application, so many of the guidelines at
> http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/SVN_Guidelines are simply not
> applicable. I just tried to be a good citizen but I have no idea
> how good...
> 
> The game server part is able to run without KDE, it only needs
> Qt4 (as my debian stable server does not offer KDE4 for
> installation...). I actually could make it run without Qt4 - but
> see no need to do so yet.
> 
> The client part is a normal KDE4 application, using backgrounds and
> tiles from libkmahjongg.
> 
> Game server and game client can of course run on the same computer,
> even sharing the same data base (SQLite). When simply playing
> against 3 computer players the server is started automatically.
> 
> I decided against using ggz for network gaming and used the
> python-twisted networking library instead. I hope this makes it
> easier to install as python-twisted has a broad user base and a
> very active community.
> 
> I also mostly decided against using qt-designer, I prefer to
> manually code the GUI. There are currently only 2 ui files for the
> config menu (background and tileset selector), similar to what
> KMahjongg does (I started Kajongg by reimplementing parts of
> libkmahjongg in Python).
> 
> You can compare Kajongg against xmj by Julian Bradfield (OSS, GTK,
> only implements the computer playing part but has quite
> intelligent computer players) or
> http://www.mahjongcalculation.com/index.htm (Windows shareware,
> only implements the scoring part). And of course there is
> http://www.4windsmj.com/ (Windows/shareware, implements both modes)
> - this one implements both modes, and it is top of the art in that
> it implements many different rulesets.


-- 
Wolfgang