[Kde-games-devel] Tagaro as an application?

[Stefan Majewsky]

Hi,

this is sort of a braindump, and a request for comments.

I'm currently booted into a newly-installed Windows 7 and watching the Steam 
client download some games I own. [1] I don't know if you know Steam. Steam 
itself is a web/cloud-based game distribution and community-building platform, 
decomposed into a website (steampowered.com) and a client application for 
Win/Mac. The client provides access to a library of games, downloads updates, 
records highscores and achievements, manages contacts and friendships, and 
displays advertisements.

This experience made me think whether a similar model might be beneficial for 
kdegames. I mean a central application for all the plumbing around the actual 
gameplay:
* downloading content (levels or levelpacks) and keeping it up-to-date
* managing highscores
* downloading and selecting themes
* GGZ matchmaking
* managing saved games

Let's call this app "Tagaro Center" for now. So for example, imagine that you 
fire up Tagaro Center and it tells you: "Heya, do you want to continue playing 
this KGoldRunner game that you left yesterday at 23:17, or do you want to 
download the Puzzle of the Day [2] from the Palapeli server? By the way, the 
Egyptian theme for KPat has been updated. I'm fetching the update right now 
and will activate it on the KPat window over there when it's done."

From the technical side, centralizing these aspects has the advantage that we 
do not need to specify public API for this in libtagaro. (And even if this 
approach fails, the API can be added later, while the inverse operation is 
BIC.)

It can also simplify the application code considerably. For example, this 
change would mean that Palapeli would become an MDI application, with Tagaro 
Center managing the puzzles and Palapeli being reduced to the puzzle table.

I'm not aware whether this infrastructure would be good or bad for the GGZ 
side of things. (Josef?) I can however imagine that having a single client 
that connects to the GGZ server is the simpler design.

The obvious downside is that there is yet another application involved in the 
whole gaming process, which might confuse new users and increase the memory 
footprint, but what do you think? Is it worth to try out this concept?

Greetings
Stefan

P.S. If we do this, we should keep the Gluon devs in the loop to ensure that 
Tagaro Center can operate as a platform for Gluon apps (if this is possible; I 
don't know any specifics about the ontology of Gluon apps and components). 
Interoperability with any other game frameworks is a subordinated goal.

[1] I never paid for these games, I've just been at the right places at the 
right times when they gave away Portal and Half Life 2 for free.
[2] Setting up a server that converts Images of the Day (e.g. from Wikipedia) 
to Puzzles of the Day is a long-standing idea of mine, which I did not realize 
yet.