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

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Ian,

On Mon, 28 Dec 2015 09:06:04 +1100
Ian Wadham <iandw.au at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 Outdated Povray-dependent graphics.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.  

Well, maybe "criticism" was the wrong word.

> What I wrote was more a justification for why such a nice
> game as KSokoban was never ported to KDE 4.

Right.

> 
> 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.
> 

I see.

> > 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.  

From what I see, the POV-Ray images are being pre-rendered into high resolution
PNGs which are then kept inside the version control system, and scaled by the
game executable itself. So POV-Ray is not required unless one wants to render
the graphics again or to modify it. 

> That said, are
> you an artist and SVG guy or do you know one?
> 

I am a far cry from being an artist (see http://www.shlomifish.org/art/ for my
attempts at “art”). There are some SVG guys on the inkscape-users mailing list,
and I also met some on #reddit-gamedev on Freenode (which is a spin off
of /r/gamedev on Reddit). Not sure we can easily find someone, but we can try.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish 


> Cheers, Ian W.
> 
> 
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