[Kde-games-devel] Generic Card Game Framework

[Luciano Montanaro]

On venerdì 12 marzo 2010, John Schneiderman wrote:
> On Thursday 11 March 2010 18:10:09 Parker Coates wrote:
> > LibKCardGame is focused only on the visual presentation and
> > interaction aspects of a card game. Just display, animation, mouse and
> > keyboard input. It makes no attempts at game rules, players, AIs or
> > anything else of that nature which I see are provided by KardsGT. I
> > have no plans to add such thing to LibKCardGame, so that one important
> > area of distinction.
> 
> What's the thinking behind only having the visual presentation in the
>  library?
> 
> > From looking at the screenshots, it doesn't really seem that KardsGT
> > is up to the graphical quality currently provided by the card games in
> > KDEGames. Can it make use of KDE's SVG based card decks? Does it
> > provide scalable interfaces or animations?
> 

Hi, I downloaded the game and tried it out; I dont know the games available, 
they are not generally known in my part of the world. So I could not really 
appreciate the games, in the quick tour I did...

> The next stable release is switching to SVG for the card graphics. As the
>  only developer, I have focused more on getting a library set-up to easily
>  create new card games then to make "wow"-factor graphics. Also doesn't
>  hurt that I'm still learning the whole graphics stuff at the moment. :D
>  The interfaces aren't scaling right now, and I suspect it has to do with
>  when I started they were designed using the Qt Creator.

That's not really a factor, the designer (and Qt creator) can be used to 
create scalable interfaces. It's just not completely obvious how to do it.

Since the game uses .ui files, I tried reworking the playerselection ui a bit, 
fixing the non resizable layout issue, and moving around a few elements to 
group things in a way that makes more sense to me. You can have a look, if you 
want, it is attached to this message. 

A similar approach could be done for other dialogs, although some ui decisions 
could some rethinking:
for example, in one of the games I tried, a popup appeared, and the task I had 
to perform was only mentioned in the window title, and it was not clear to me 
the way I had to perform it. I really think you should explain the task in the 
window body, mentioning that the cards had to be dragged from one row of cards 
to the empty row below. Or maybe the dialog could be removed entirely, and the 
operation performed on the game board instead...

I understand you wanting to concentrate on game logic first, but I see there 
are a few games already available; some attention to graphics and user 
interface would bring your project to a wider audience.

>  So, that's just a
>  matter of changing a few things there. There isn't any code that does
>  animations, but all card movements happen by drag-and-drop. So, I imagine
>  adding the animation code there would be trivial.

Well, the game still uses fixed layouts, and cards are simply cropped to make 
them fit the layout... It may be more work than you think. And sadly, it's 
something much more evident than the quality of the game logic, so it's 
important. Dedicate some time to this task, it will improve the game for 
current players too, regardless of KDE inclusion.

>  I never said it was
>  ready to go straight into the KDE base, but that is where I would like to
>  take the project. The more efforts that can be combined, the less time it
>  would take to bring it up in graphical quality.

Well, KDE sources are there to be used, modified, improved. And KDE developers 
are accessible too, there is always someone on #kdegames to answer questions.

Luciano

-- 
Luciano Montanaro //
                \X/ mikelima at cirulla.net
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