[Kde-games-devel] GSoC Applicant Asking For Help

[Ian Wadham]

On 02/03/2012, at 12:25 PM, Roney Gomes wrote:
> Like in some other e-mails you probably received in the last months,
> I'm another GSoC applicant asking for some help in this first contact,
> and before introducing my doubts (and myself as well), I think that's
> important to say that I've previously looked for information in other
> sources, such as the Kde.org website and the Kde Devel mailing list,
> they all pointed to here.
> 
> I'm a CS student from Brazil and have some knowledge in C++ and
> programming in general, but my experience is restricted only to small
> algorithms with no real applications. Academy stuff.

Hmmmm … you may be starting at a disadvantage …  Edsger Dijkstra
once compared the experience of writing a small program (less than
100 lines) to standing on a deserted beach at sunset with a lone
man on a horse galloping towards you --- a truly beautiful scene.
Then, he said, picture the same scene with a hundred horsemen
galloping towards you! 

Working on a large program is very much more difficult --- but people
manage to do it, so do not be discouraged.

Some of our games have thousands of lines of code, but the use of
object-oriented programming makes the "100 horsemen" scenario
a bit easier to handle than it was in Dijkstra's day.

If you have worked on a C++ application of that kind of size,
no worries.

Which city of Brazil do you come from, BTW?  One of our former KDE
Games members is from Brazil and might be able to give you some tips.

> In the ideas page I saw the one related to changing the rendering
> routines and the framework used by some games, that is, to port them
> to KGameRenderer and QGraphicsView, and became very interested.
> 
> The first problem I see is that such framework is totally unknown to
> me, so the the first things I'd like to know are:
> 
> 1. Which are the games to be ported?
> 
> 2. Where can I find the necessary codebase and documentation to study?

The codebase is at http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdegames/ and
the easiest game to study might be kdiamond, but it is already using
KGameRenderer.  techbase.kde.org has a lot of information about
how to download and build KDE source code, such as by using
kdesrc-build, as well as tutorials on how things are done in KDE.

User handbooks for the games are in the kdegames/doc directory,
in XML Docbook format.  Program documentation in KDE Games is
scarce, but you might find some embedded in the code as comments
in Doxygen format --- or even just plain ordinary comments … :-)

> I'd really appreciate your help and comprehension (regarding my
> horrible English). Thanks in advance.

Your English is excellent, Roney!

All the best, Ian Wadham,
Melbourne, Australia.