[Kde-games-devel] Another take on touch-enabled interfaces for KDE games

[Stefan Majewsky]

[I choose kde-games-devel@ for the main discussion; please keep it
CC'd in all replies]

Moin moin,

I've hacked on another try to create a general type of touch-enabled
interfaces for kdegames, based on the following basic observations:

1. Dialogs e.g. for highscores just don't feel right on a touch
interface. Especially, they're in the screen center and thus far away
from the action buttons that bring up dialogs.

2. If the dialog is embedded in the application window, we should try
hard to not resize the game canvas. Resizing means in most cases that
background pixmaps need to be rerendered, which is very expensive.

My solution is to place toolbars at one or both short sides of the
canvas. Commonly used single actions (pause, hint, etc.) are
represented by icon-only toolbuttons. All other actions are placed on
dialogs which can be pulled in from the side; pull handles are placed
on the toolbars.

The current library implementation (in libtagaro as a TouchWindow
class) supports only one toolbar on the left, but that is sufficient
for KDiamond, which again serves as a guinea pig. KDiamond Active is
also unfinished in many ways: Highscores are just displayed with an
old-fashioned KScoreDialog placed inside the main window. Difficulty
adjustments etc. are not possible (a "New game" dialog is missing),
and the statusbar is not there. The purpose of this mail is just to
collect feedback on the basic interaction mechanism.

To build it, follow the following steps:

1. git clone kde:libtagaro, select the majewsky/active branch, build and install
2. svn checkout .../trunk/KDE/kdegames, apply the attached patch
(-p1), build with flag -DKDEGAMES_ACTIVE=ON to cmake
3. run KDiamond (you can do this without installing it *if* you
already have KDiamond's data files installed)

Feedback is very much appreciated.

Greetings
Stefan
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