[Kde-games-devel] GSoC 2010

[Mauricio Piacentini]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 1:06 PM, Arjen-Wander Hiemstra
<djfreestyler at gmail.com> wrote:
..
> The idea of the Gluon Libraries is that they provide a Qt-based interface for
> several more low level libraries, as well as some "glue code" to support
> object hierarchies and such. It does not make a whole lot of sense to have
> these libraries depend on KDELibs, as there is little added value for these
> libraries.

I agree with your rationale.

> Then there will be a very simple Qt-only player, which will basically be a
> graphics display widget in a window, which can be used as player if there is
> no KDE available. The "real" player, with features like GHNS integration and
> others, will be using KDELibs and possibly other technologies. (Plasma
> perhaps? I like how Bangarang uses it.)
>
> There is also Gluon Creator, which is a major part of our project. This is
> heavily based on KDE library technology and we are not planning to change
> that. We're planning to use the KDevelop Platform libraries for our code
> editor, which means we'll be even more linked to KDE on that front. ;)

Good overview, thanks for sharing! As I mentioned, depending on KDE
for Windows and Mac now is a bit risky, specially if you want to
deliver a self-contained game (executable). So the strategy of having
a slimmer player for these platforms might work.

> As for libkdegames, I'm not sure what functionality it provides, so I cannot
> comment on that. Considering that Gluon Games will run in the Gluon Player,
> they will most likely not make use of libkdegames, no.

Libkdegames provides stuff like the common score dialog, the ability
to theme in a standard way, a shared timer, this sort of things. There
is an older layer there that few games use nowadays, the KGame*
framework.
These were developed with the c++ game author in mind, I do not think
they will translate cleanly to Gluon. But it is likely that you guys
will end up inventing your own version of some of these eventually.

> Our current repository is a Git repo. I don't know who originally proposed
> this, as it was already on Git when I joined. But I personally would not
> really want to go back to SVN. I'm becoming more and more confident with Git
> and things like our current work on renaming would be a lot harder without it.
>
> When KDE Games moves over to Git we can of course see if it is doable to move
> Gluon over to extragear/games or even KDE/kdegames.

The move is apparently getting closer, so hopefully this will be a
short term obstacle. And..
>
> I agree that the separate community things are not ideal. But we have been
> mostly busy with getting a first alpha out. I think after the alpha release it
> is a good moment to see how Gluon can become more of a part of KDEGames.
>

Yes, this is the sort of collaboration I think can help everyone, and
the sooner it happens the better! Thanks for posting here, and please
visit us regularly. It is a loose community, but we have folks here
that have been hacking on KDE for ages, and can probably help you guys
along the way if needed.

Regards
Mauricio Piacentini