[Kde-games-devel] libkdegames v5

[Ian Wadham]

On 02/02/2012, at 8:29 AM, Kleag wrote:
> BTW, it's a pitty that no other game use KGame. It gives really a lot of 
> useful stuff for games. But I know, its outdated, not a lot documented and not 
> maintained, so it's not the point to resurrect it.

I think much of the state of our library is due to historical reasons, plus the
fact, AFAICR, that there has never been a "maintainer" of the library, although
some have nominally held the role.

I joined KDE Games almost ten years ago.  At that time, there was a group
that enjoyed writing library stuff, but unfortunately the stable door was closing
after the horse had left.  For example, I think most of the turn-based games
had been written before KGame came along.

Other things got written because they seemed like a good idea at the time
and there was enthusiasm for them on this list, but somehow they never
got used much, such as KGameSvgDigits and KGameProgress.

KGameCanvas came in because of poor performance in early versions
of QGraphicsView and the sudden demise of QCanvas, which worked fine
on games in Qt3.  A particular case was KGoldrunner, which would not run
at all well with QGV and performance was so bad it became unplayable.

Certainly all the dead wood should be deprecated and withdrawn from
view, whatever the reason for its current state.

It would be nice to retro-fit some things (for example should all turn-based
games use KGame?), but it is hard to arouse enthusiasm for that.  In the
case of KGoldrunner it would be a lot of work to rewrite the view classes
to use QGraphicsView and KGameRenderer, for no visible result.

And before I start, how can I be sure QGV is now fast enough?  The machines
I worked on for porting KGr to Qt4 both died last year and I now have a 2GHz
Quad core Intel i7 processor.  So I would have no way to tell if QGV + KGr
would be fast enough across a range of machines.  Of course (nods to
Christian) I could tell people that they should have a 64-bit machine, but
that is not my philosophy and never has been … :-)

Re merging in Tagaro audio… please do!!!  Phonon does not cut it for games.

Also could the libsndfile bizzo be settled?  KGr is carrying around both .ogg
and .wav versions of its sound files because some versions of libsndfile do
not support .ogg.

Re the rest of Tagaro, please beware.  We are between a rock and a hard
place.  If we generalise stuff which is in existing games there may be no
compelling reasons to retro-fit, also new games appear only infrequently.
OTOH if we design new stuff that games "ought" to need, it might not "sell".
Library design is really hard IMHO, especially in the games application area.

All the best, Ian W.