[Kde-games-devel] KMahjongg archaeology

[Christian Krippendorf]

On Sun, Jan 04, 2015 at 08:22:39PM +1100, Ian Wadham wrote:
> Hi Alberto, and Christian if you are out there,
>

Yearh i am available. :-)

> Back in mid-2012 Christian Krippendorf did a lot of work on KMahjongg
> to port the game from the obsolete and now-deprecated graphics system,
> KGameCanvas, to the standard Qt graphics system, QGraphicsView.
> 
> KGameCanvas was a home-grown graphics library which was used for
> a time by some KDE Games, after they were ported to KDE 4 and Qt 4
> in 2007-2008, because the official Qt 4 graphics system (QGraphicsView)
> was simply not fast enough, in its early releases, to keep up with the
> animation in those games.  KGoldrunner was another game affected.
> So I know a bit about what happened and why.
> 
> By 2012, QGraphicsView had matured and there was a big push, in KDE
> Games to get games ported to newer and more-standard software.  For
> example, Roney did a GSoC assignment in which he ported KGoldrunner
> and some other games.  Around September 2012, KDE Games moved
> from SVN to GIT.  Christian had been developing on a SVN branch.
> 
> AFAIK all his commits on the SVN branch were copied into a GIT branch
> called "qgraphic" on the central KMahjongg repository, but that branch
> apparently was never merged into "master".  Consequently, I believe,
> KMahjongg is still using the obsolete and deprecated KGameCanvas
> library.  The two relevant threads I dug up in the archive begin as follows:
> 
>     Port of KMahjongg    2012-07-22 19:47:14
>     http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-games-devel&m=134298673514689&w=2
> 
>     KMahjongg git           2012-09-21 7:50:50
>     http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-games-devel&m=134821387124389&w=2
> 
> Also, there is this review request which might contain useful code:
> 
>     Review Request: kmahjongg: Feature Request of a fast selection when selecting unmatch tiles
>     https://svn.reviewboard.kde.org/r/6836/
> 
> I do not know how complete, reviewed and tested Christian's code is,
> but he certainly put in a lot of work on it.  I succeeded in compiling,
> building and installing it at first try, even though I have KDE 4.14 libs
> and the "qgraphic" branch of KMahjongg was originally written for
> around KDE 4.8 library.
> 
> I played a few games with different layouts with no problem and
> the graphics were certainly a lot snappier than I am getting on the
> released version of KMahjongg, especially on theme changes,
> resizes of the main window and animations.  On the whole, Christian's
> code works very well.  I have a sneaking suspicion that Christian's
> branch might also have fixed some of the bugs Jan-Peter Nilsson has
> been working on… :-(
>

There are some bugs in this code. But I don't know anymore what bugs, cause it
is a long time ago I've been working on it.

> So now we have divergent streams of work on KMahjongg:
> 
>   - A released version of KMahjongg, using obsolete graphics,
>   - Laurent's port of existing KMahjongg to KF5, using obsolete graphics,
>   - Christian's port of KMahjongg to QGraphicsView --- branch "qgraphic", unmerged,
>   - The patch in the above ReviewBoard entry,
>   - A whole slew of Jan-Peter Nilsson's patches on Bugzilla and ReviewBoard,
>     some of which may clash with Christian's "qgraphic" branch.
> 
> What to do?  I really hate to see good work slipping away.
>

I also told in mid-2012 that I will no longer work on KMahjongg cause of
starting to study chemistry and having a full-time job. So I don't have the time
anymore. I also told someone (sry don't know anymore which person) that the port
is nearly ready. Just few small bugs.

I also would like to see the code merged into the master branch. But I don't
know which work has been done after mid-2012 and beside my port.

Please keep me involved in this process, cause I would like help, if I find a
little bit of extra time beside my other real-life-things. :-)

> All the best, Ian W.
> 
> 

-- 

Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Best regards
Christian Krippendorf

XING: https://www.xing.com/profile/ChristianBernd_Krippendorf
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=249992150
GitHub: https://github.com/CerebrosuS