[Kde-games-devel] Konquest development

[Alexander Schuch]

Hello,

Konquest right now shows each message regarding a player's planet as a
message box. This is very annoying as it even includes supply fleet
arrivals. With standing orders and a few planets. there are many
messages per turn to be "acknowledged" - see
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=298274 as well.

All these messages are logged in the status window area as well.

So what do you think? Should the message box simple be removed as this
information is available in the message log already, or should I
implement (I believe) KNotification, so that the user can configure
whether or not to show those messages as well and, more important,
how: as message box or as notification. Or should Konquest itself show
some kind of turn summary - suggestions?

The second thing I like to get opinions about is keyboard playing.

Konquest can be played via keyboard only. The usual flow is to simply
select a source planet (type "A" for planet A), select a destination
planet (type "C" for planet C). The focus jumps to the fleet size
input box. It now is possible to use Alt+O to toggle "standing orders"
and to enter a fleet size and accept. This can be repeated as much as
required, and the turn finally ended by Alt+E.

For information about any planet, "?A" (for planet A") will do the trick.

As outlined in https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162014, it is
hardly possible to play with more than 26 planets, due to the lack of
easily to reach characters on the keyboard.

My idea is to introduce a command line with following options:

- "A3B" - send 3 ships from planet A to planet B
- "C+3D" - add 3 ships as standing order from C to D
- "?F" - show information about planet F

The advantage of this is that planet names can be longer then: "A-Z"
and "AA-ZZ", so even a very big universe can be played with keyboard
only.

What do you think?

Regards,
Alexander