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

[Ian Wadham]

Hi Shlomi,

On 28/12/2015, at 1:03 AM, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Dec 2015 16:26:05 +1100
> Ian Wadham <iandw.au at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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 Outdated Povray-dependent graphics.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).
>> 
> 
> This is just to note that I can agree with this criticism.

No criticism was intended, Shlomi, especially not of your porting
work.  What I wrote was more a justification for why such a nice
game as KSokoban was never ported to KDE 4.

All the KDE 3 games were reviewed, by the KDE Games team and
by an on-line survey on SurveyMonkey.  Porting to KDE 4 and Qt 4
included major upgrades to graphics (SVG), theming, resizing and
look-and-feel.  The windowed, desktoppy look remained (rather
than full-screen) because that is what most users wanted (casual
use while they did other work on the computer).

Several good games were lost to "unmaintained" due to lack of
resources to do all the work, notably KBackgammon, KPoker,
KSirtet (Tetris clone) and KSame, although we did manage to
deliver 24 games with the first release of KDE 4 and more with
later releases.

KSirtet has been replaced by KBlocks (one KDE Games guy had
his girlfriend threatening to leave him if we lost KSirtet… :-)).  And
KSame is now a "flavour" of Klickety.

> Perhaps I'll work on tackling one or more items out of your list,
> and other people are welcome to contribute as well.

I don't know if using Povray requires a dependency outside of
Frameworks, Qt 5 and libkdegames, but (re)introducing a new
dependency is frowned upon in KF5, I believe.  That said, are
you an artist and SVG guy or do you know one?

Cheers, Ian W.