[Kde-games-devel] GSoC 2012 - Porting Games to QML

[Mehmet Emre]

2012/3/4 Ian Wadham <iandw.au at gmail.com>:
> Your next step would be to show us what you can do, e.g. by submitting
> a patch to fix a bug in a game or add a small feature.

I can port a game to QGV to show what I'm capable of. I can either
submit a patch
or create a fork of the game and submit the fork.

> Please note that there are engineering concerns with converting some of the
> games from KGameCanvas to QGraphicsView and from QGraphicsView to QML.
>
> They concern the speed and consistency of animation in QGraphicsView and
> possibly in QML.  Some games require continuous quick animation, such as
> KGoldrunner.  In past versions, QGV was fast enough most of the time, but
> had annoying cases in which the animation would hiccup (freeze up) at
> random for several tenths of a second, making the game unplayable.  That
> is why we switched to KGameCanvas.  Maybe QGV is nowadays fast enough
> and consistent enough, but …
>
> ... there is a risk that switching from one graphics stack to another could
> introduce subtle, hard to diagnose, bugs into a currently working game.
>
> There is less risk of that if you only change the code that renders SVG and
> caches pixmaps, which is largely in the startup/initialisation of games.  See
> the warnings in http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Games/Porting ...

Then it might be hard to port a game properly, to prevent fails in performance I
will firstly only change the rendering code and if it hiccups then I
try to solve
the hiccups without touching the graphic stack but if it still fails
then I might
have to change the graphics stack bu I'll try to avoid that as much as I can.

> I appreciate your "kill two birds with one stone" idea, Mehmet, but please
> beware of biting off more than you can chew.

By taking your advice I'll participate GSoC only for porting from KGameCanvas to
QGV and later on (after properly finishing the porting as project i.e.
after this
summer) I may try to move the games I moved to QGV to QML.

-- 
Mehmet Emre