[Kde-games-devel] KGameRenderer v. KGoldrunner: some problems

[Ian Wadham]

Hi guys, especially Stefan,

It looks as though KGoldrunner has some problems regarding the
use of KgView, KgViewProvider and KGameRenderer.

1. Every theme has *two* SVG files: one for "set" (the tiles, gold,
    ladders, etc.) and one for "actors" (the hero and enemies).
    Also the .desktop files have Set and Actors attributes, rather
    FileName.

2. The themes contain elements with a variety of suffix formats:
    -%1, _%1 or even %1.

3. Some suffixes start at 0 and some start at 1.

4. Some suffixes are optional, depending on whether the artist
    has drawn more than one version of an element, e.g. you can
    have "background0", "background1", etc. or just "background".

I think point 4 is already handled by KGameRenderer::frameCount().

On points 2 and 3, I am not clear on whether setFrameSuffix() and
setFrameBaseIndex() can be used repeatedly with different parameters
or whether they are for use once-only per KGameRenderer.  If
once-only, we have a problem.

Re point 1, would it work to change "Set" to "FileName" in the .desktop
files and have Actors as a custom attribute, then have a *second*
(artificially constructed) KgTheme and a *second* KGameRenderer to
provide the pixmaps for hero and enemies?  Or would that mess up the
cacheing?

At present, KGoldrunner has two QSvgRenderer's but puts all pixmaps
in the same cache.  Having two caches, one per KGameRenderer,
should not be a problem.

Would the above ideas work?  Any other ideas?

Thanks in advance, Ian W.

P.S. I do not like the idea of manually merging and committing the pairs
of huge binary files KGoldrunner has for its themes, but that might be
a brute-force way to solve problem 1, if it can be done reliably and
without large overheads on the repository.