[Kde-games-devel] New card game for kde, first contribution

[Ian Wadham]

Hi Olivier,

On 25/06/2015, at 3:51 PM, Olivier Attaque wrote:
> I just leaved Melbourne 1 month ago where I stayed 5 months :P

Ships that pass in the night… :-)

> Sorry for the delay with my reply, I was thinking of the best direction to go.
> Before your answer I sent a mail to Stephan Kulow the current maintainer of KPat.
> He told me that he was not really maintaining KPat anymore, he doesn't read this mailing list anymore.
> He proposed me to be the maintainer and to make this decision myself, but as this is my first contribution I'm not sure i'm experienced enough to take over this maintainership.

Parker Coates was the last active maintainer of KPat, but we have not
heard from him for a year or so.  Stephan also helped out occasionally,
but only with issues in the Solver.  I cannot help you much with KPat, but
maybe Parker can give you some hints.

> But what he said to me and your input make sense.
> I think i'll let "krapette" (thanks for the note on the name btw, I will stick with the most known name "Russian Bank") inside KPat but i'll remove the ability to change players input (so it will be only player against computer), also i'll remove the rule where you can stop other player progression if he makes a mistake.
> This to keep the game and the ui simple so it better fit in KPat.

I still think it would be better to have Russian Bank and KPat as a two
separate executables, but they can still share source code in the KPat
repository.  Otherwise, I think it will feel strange for a user to be playing
with passive cards sometimes and then later with a computer opponent.
And the UI would probably need to be changing too.

> As I'm really enthusiast about contributing for kde, i think after this i'll try do to some other stuff (bug fix, improvements in kde games and kdeedu), but i'll develop a proper, separate application later with the features i removed from the KPat version and with a match feature, tablet/table ui for 2 players, more detailled settings for compulsory moves, variants rules etc. And maybe this one could be named Klondike Battle but we'll see..

Well there are lots of unmaintained games and lots of bugs too… :-)  Are
you working with KDE 4 or KF5?  KF5 is where the focus is now.  And
quite a few games have been ported to KF5 and have KF5 code in the
master branch.

> I may still have a question for you as I'm working on integrating KgDifficulty in KPat.
> The trick here is that it's only needed for my game (for now) so i modified the application to only show it when it launch my game (or any other game that implement getKgDifficulty()) but with the state of the lib I can't hide or remove the gui when the game type is changed (for example from russian bank to simon).

See what I meant (above)?

> I saw that you talk about the possibility to tweak KgDifficultyGui here https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-games-devel/2012-February/008552.html, what do you think of what new abilities I need from KgDifficultyGui for KPat, do you think it is doable ? I've you done any progress ou willing to do something similar or maybe it's a task that a newbie like me could do ?

I did not like the fact that KgDifficulty is bound to the status bar.  I wanted it to be
also available as a widget that could be placed anywhere in the GUI.  In KSudoku,
I had to have buttons in different screen areas, which looks a bit messy.

Anyway, I never got around to changing KgDifficulty.  And now it has been
ported to KF 5.

> Otherwise I could just do it by myself in the settings menu, it's not really what
> libkdegames want I guess, but it could be fine.

It's not unknown.  For example, KJumpingCube has difficulty sliders in the
Settings dialog (two of them) … :-)

Cheers, Ian W.