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

[Roney Gomes]

On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 11:23 PM, Ian Wadham <iandw.au at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I already worked with large applications, and by "large applications"
I mean multiple files and more than 500 lines of code. The problem I
see is that such applications had no other purpose than learn and see
how some data structures work. I still remember the scary AVL trees.

Dijkstra was kinda nazi in some aspects, just see what he thought
about the use of goto, the "forbidden resource".

> 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.

I'm from Fortaleza.

> 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 … :-)

Thank you, as soon as I prepare a decent programming environment I'll
start the reading.

> Your English is excellent, Roney!

Thank you again, the hours spent watching some TV series and reading
books in English were not in vain. :-)