[Kde-games-devel] [Announce] KSokoban's Port to KDE Frameworks 5 (KF5) is [Mostly] Complete

[Ian Wadham]

Hi Albert and Shlomi,

On 21/12/2015, at 5:59 AM, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> El Sunday 20 December 2015, a les 16:28:04, Shlomi Fish va escriure:
>> I recently mostly finished porting the KSokoban maintenance port on
>> SourceForge from KDE 4 to KF5 :
>> 
>> http://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/projects/ksokoban/
> 
> Why are you using sourceforge instead of KDE infrastructure?

Actually KSokoban is in KDE infrastructure.  It was moved into
"unmaintained" during the transition of KDE Games from KDE 3
to KDE 4.  It is now at https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=ksokoban.git
still in its unmaintained state, AFAICT, although Scripty pays it
a visit once or twice a year.

Shlomi's version appears to be more advanced, in that it has
been ported to KDE 4 and Frameworks libraries, but that seems
to be all.  At a casual reading, it still seems to have the same
problems that decided us not to port KSokoban to KDE 4, after
quite a lot of discussion on the KDE Games list.  These were
some of the reasons:

  1. Unmaintained (no contact with original author/maintainer).
  2. Obscure code.  Also rather C-like style.
  3. Outdated Povray-dependent graphics.
  4. Beginners' levels lost in an earlier update.
  5. Weird way of loading and accessing data for levels, by
      compiling them into the object-code somehow.
  6. Priority allocation of limited KDE Games developer time
      given to games that were easier to upgrade (e.g. KAtomic).

KSokoban was one of my favourite games and I was sad to see
it go.  At one stage I started to write a new version that would be
themeable, use SVG graphics and have separately loadable
games and levels, perhaps even a game editor…

However, it turned out that someone in Poland was simultaneously
doing the same thing and calling it Magazynier (Polish for shopkeeper).

It seemed that he was further advanced than me, so I stood
aside and let him continue.  AFAIK, Magazynier never got
finished and I think the code may be still be in "playground".

It would be nice to see a revival of KSokoban or Magazynier,
in a graphics style that matches other KDE Games, but it would
be quite a bit of work to modernise it.

Cheers, Ian W.