[Kde-games-devel] Introducing Myself to This List

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all!

My name is Shlomi Fish and you can learn more about me from my homepage - 
http://www.shlomifish.org/ .

About me and KDE:
-----------------

I've been using KDE since version 1.x - I recall compiling it from source on 
my Red Hat Linux (back when it still existed) and was impressed by how good it 
looked (for its time). For some time between KDE 1.x and KDE 2.x, I switched 
to using GNOME 1.x as my primary environment, but in KDE 2.x, I returned and 
was happily using KDE 2.x and KDE 3.x.

KDE 4.x has been somewhat disappointing so far due to its relative 
sluggishness , bugginess, the fact it had many features I liked removed, and 
some other quirks. KDE 4.4.0 looks pretty well so far, though, though it still 
could use some improvement. I've been reporting KDE bugs as I find them on my 
bugs.kde.org account - http://xrl.us/bgwpan . I'm using KDE 4.4.0 on my 
Mandriva Linux Cooker system to type this message.

About me and Games:
-------------------

I've started playing games on the computer since I got my first PC XT machine 
(with two floppy drives and no hard disk). I still remember such games as the 
DOS-based Alley Cat and the first King's Quest, which acted as its own 
operating system, and where I had a lot of difficulty getting Sir Graham to 
walk on the bridge across the chasm.

I've been playing a lot of adventure games and puzzle games (and some action 
games, etc.) for DOS during my childhood and adolescence. The last retail game 
I finished was Monkey Island 4 ("Escape from Monkey Island") which was much 
better than the third installment. I'm also at the very beginning of WarCraft 
III (having finished WarCraft 2 and enjoyed it), and am not too bothered with 
finishing it.

Lately, I've been playing mostly either Flash puzzle games (which I think are 
a new Renaissance of quality, playable games and I find them a lot of fun), as 
well as my old favourites of the Freecell and Simple Simon solitaires using 
http://pysolfc.sourceforge.net/ , and even more lately some Nikoli-style 
puzzle games such as Hitori, Fillomino, Nurikabe, Kakuro, Tents, etc. - see 
http://www.brainbashers.com/games.asp . I'm not playing Sudoku and its various 
variants, though, because I don't like them.

I used to play Sokoban using KSokoban, and am now feeling its absence from KDE 
4.x .

My plans for KDE Games:
-----------------------

Well, I'd like to restore KSokoban, so I'd like to work on porting the code 
from KDE 3.x.

I should also note that I am grateful to Stephan Kulow for integrating my 
library, Freecell Solver ( http://fc-solve.berlios.de/ ) into the KPat of KDE 
2.1.x, and providing a lot of input for improving it. Lately, the KPat 
developers have abandoned fc-solve in favour of Dr. Tom Holroyd's patsolve 
(whom they call "Dr. Tom"), but I still feel fc-solve is much superior, and 
I've resumed improving it lately. 

At a point, the KPat solving algorithm caused the solution for many deals to 
end up in what appeared to be infinite loops because of some reason. (I don't 
think it was a problem with the original KPat). Moreover, the transition to 
KPat caused the KPat Freecell-implementation to lose some generality for the 
ability to implement other Freecell-like games. Moreover, the interface to the 
solver was not well-defined with assignment to variables and other anti-
patterns like that.

I've started writing a patch to integrate fc-solve into the latest KPatience, 
but noticed that I didn't know what the priority of the moves should be (a 
move consisted of a source, destination, number of cards or target card (can't 
remember) and priority), and I don't understand what is the meaning of it, nor 
is it documented in the KPat code or is easy to understand from the code.

I still think I have the patch somewhere if anyone is interested to work on 
it.

On the other hand, the PySolFC developers recently integrated fc-solve into 
PySolFC (for many of their supported games) and this is the Solitaire 
implementation I prefer to use.

So my plans are:

1. Restore KSokoban.

2. Integrate Freecell Solver / fc-solve into KPat.

3. Possibly implement Black Hole Solitaire into KPat along with support for a 
variant of my solver: 

http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/projects/black-hole-solitaire-solver/

It's written in Perl 5 at the moment (initially as a PoC/Prototype), but I've 
been meaning to convert it to C/C++. 

4. Maybe implement some Hitori, Fillomino, Kakuro, etc. games for KDE.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

-- 
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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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