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

[Ian Wadham]

Hi Roney,

On 02/03/2012, at 11:30 PM, Roney Gomes wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 11:23 PM, Ian Wadham <iandw.au at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.

500 is getting up there …

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

Heh! I appreciate your irreverence, but please do not ever call anybody a
name like that on an email list.  "Netiquette" is important.

As to the "goto", I cannot remember when I last used one.  Does it even
exist in C++?  Certainly Dijkstra's targeting the goto crystallised for a whole
generation of programmers, myself included, what was wrong with the
"spaghetti bowl" programs some people used to write (present company
excepted).  I was working on real-time systems, necessarily in Assembler
(C was not invented then), and had various empirical rules of thumb to
avoid chaos and unmanageable complexity in programs, such as "try to
avoid jumping off a 60-line page".  The notion of structured programming
came a little later and was a real revolution (revelation?).

> 
>> 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.

I see that is up near the Equator.  Rather a long way from Sao Paulo where
our former colleague is!   Brazil is a very large country, even bigger than
Australia I believe.

>> 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.

Oh, and you can use anonsvn to check out large numbers of files with SVN.

Re the list of games to be ported and GSoC on KDE, here are some links:

http://community.kde.org/GSoC/2012/Ideas#Project:_Port_games_to_more_modern_graphics_frameworks
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Games/Porting
http://teom.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/how-to-write-a-kick-ass-proposal-for-google-summer-of-code/
http://community.kde.org/GSoC
http://google-melange.appspot.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2012

Note that the aim is just to port the rendering and cacheing of graphics to
KGameRenderer, not to change the underlying graphics stack.

I am not really au fait with GSoC, but am catching up fast.  It is more like
a "winter of code" where I live and a "same season all year round of code"
where you live … :-)

I think the general idea, if you have time after all that reading, is to show your
ability and gain our respect by submitting a patch to fix a bug in some game
or add a small feature.  If you have not been following the KDE Games list, see:
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-games-devel&r=1&b=201202&w=2 and the thread
http://lists.kde.org/?t=133027501800001&r=1&w=2
for the kind of thing I mean.

The above is a lot to assimilate in a short time, but please have a go!
I like your style, so let's see what you can do ...

All the best, Ian W.