Current status of the frameworks branch of kdelibs4-based games

[Ian Wadham]

Hi Luigi,

I have been dreading this day.  Fifteen years of my work for KDE
Games about to go down the gurgler and there is nothing much
I can do about it… :-(

I have been working on an Apple machine for several years but 
have lost track of where porting Frameworks and Qt5 themselves
to Apple OS X and MacPorts currently stand.  So some games I
have worked on never got ported to Frameworks.

In any case, I am now 79 years old and gave up coding a year or
more ago…

Re the games I used to work on…  These games have given pleasure
to hundreds, maybe thousands, of people, so I hope someone can
rescue them.

It is awful to see good games go into "unmaintained" and no longer
be released, as happened with a few good ones in the transition
from KDE 3 to KDE 4.

Just some comments below, hopefully helpful to someone, re the games
I used to work on: KGoldrunner, Kolf, KSudoku, Kubrick and Palapeli.

On 10/04/2017, at 6:08 AM, Luigi Toscano wrote:
> == kgoldrunner
> * relevant contributors to the frameworks branch: Laurent Montel, Frederik
> Schwarzer
> * there are relevant changes in master but not in frameworks
> * few "QT5" porting notes
> * missing appdata file
> * depends on KDELibs4Support
> * starts and apparently works
> * *suggestion*: check the porting notes, merge master into frameworks and retest

Sounds good.  Don't even know what an app data file is… :-)  Should port
further fairly easily.  It mainly depends on just the main window and standard
GUI features of KDE and Qt.  It is self-testing, via a demo, when it starts.

The startup code to do with checking that the levels data and handbook are
present can be deleted or commented out.  It is legacy code and is known to
have caused a problem lately on at least one platform.

> == kolf
> * relevant contributors to the frameworks branch: Laurent Montel, Frederik
> Schwarzer
> * all changes in master are in frameworks
> * various "QT5" porting notes
> * missing appdata file
> * depends on KDELibs4Support
> * starts and apparently works, few runtime warnings
> * *suggestion*: check the porting notes and the runtime warnings

Similar comments to KGoldrunner.

> == ksudoku
> * relevant contributors to the frameworks branch: Laurent Montel, Frederik
> Schwarzer, Luigi Toscano
> * all changes in master are in frameworks
> * one "QT5" porting note
> * provides an appdata file
> * depends on KDELibs4Support
> * starts, and apparently works (fixed only one visible porting error)
> * *suggestion*: recheck the last porting notes and then merge into master

Similar comments to KGoldrunner.  If you can create a few different kinds
of puzzle, including both 2-D and 3-D, it has already exercised a lot of code.
Just test the UI with 4x4 puzzles or such like.  3-D puzzles use OpenGL.

> == kubrick
> * relevant contributors to the frameworks branch: Laurent Montel, Frederik
> Schwarzer
> * all changes in master are in frameworks
> * various "QT5" porting note
> * missing appdata file
> * depends on KDELibs4Support
> * starts, and apparently works
> * *suggestion*: recheck the porting notes

Similar comments to KGoldrunner, but it is a 3-D game involving OpenGL.
The startup demo gives it a good workout, but the UI would need testing.

> == palapeli
> * relevant contributors to the frameworks branch: Laurent Montel, Nicolas
> Lécureuil, Frederik Schwarzer
> * there are relevant changes in master but not in frameworks
> * few "QT5" porting note
> * missing appdata file
> * depends on KDELibs4Support
> * crashes on startup (probably related to one of the QT5 porting notes)

If you install Palapeli into an area where it was not installed before, it
starts by generating its demonstration puzzles.  To do this it has to load
a plugin library of jigsaw slicer algorithms.  If it cannot load the plugin, it
crashes.  See what the stderr messages say.

Possibly you can prevent this crash by running an appropriate  version of
kbuildsycoca immediately after building.  Or maybe Frameworks handles
plugins differently...

> * *suggestion*: merge master into frameworks, definitely some work needed

If you fix the startup and still have problems, good luck…  The internal handling
of pieces, puzzle files and mouse actions is pretty complicated.  I only worked
on the aids for solving large jigsaw puzzles (> 300 pieces, see Chapter 5 of the
handbook https://docs.kde.org/stable4/en/kdegames/palapeli/index.html).

However, if anybody steps up to complete the port, I will be very happy to try
and answer any questions they may have about the Palapeli code.  The same
goes for the other games mentioned above.

All the best,
Ian W.