[Kde-games-devel] Re: New Kpat feature.

[Parker Coates]

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 14:36, Matthew J. Gaines wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm a new developer and my partner and I were wondering if adding a feature to
> Kpat would be a good idea. We were thining of implementing a new menu item
> that would allow users to take their own photos and use them as backs for their
> own deck. We would like to know if this feature would be desirable and if it is if
> anyone has any tips to consider when programming in Kpat code.

Hello Matthew,

This is a feature that has been suggested and discussed in the past,
so it would be appreciated. As you probably know (and may have been
prompted by) in the past few releases KPat has dropped the ability to
select card backs independently from card fronts. See here [1] for
some of the reasoning behind that decision. Regardless, this change
does increase the demand for the ability to create custom deck.

As for the actual implementation, making the feature a part of KPat is
actually a pretty bad idea. KDE's carddecks are shared between our
card games (which are currently just KPat and LSkat, but there could
be more in the future). Obviously, we'd like to have this feature
available to all games. I see two ways of doing this: integrating this
feature into the card dialog or creating a separate application (which
could then be launched via a button in the card dialog). Since
creating new decks involves only creating the appropriate files on
disk, I would recommend starting with the latter approach. There is no
need for this feature to be tightly integrated into either game, which
is good news for you, as both the KPat and LSkat codebases are quite
old and have plenty of scary parts you'll be glad if you can avoid.

Could you please outline exactly what functionality you're thinking of
providing and how it would be presented to the user? I have a few
ideas, but I'd like to hear your (rough) plans before sharing them.
Also, what is your experience level with C++, Qt, KDE and/or SVG
programming?

Antonis mentioned the feature freeze, but we can certainly find
somewhere else for you to work on this in the meantime.

Parker


[1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=251582#c1